Arts , Humanities & Social Science

Abstract

Yijing (I Ching, commonly known as the Book of Changes), regarded as the leader of all the Chinese classics and a profound influence on Chinese thoughts, has been puzzling both the Western and the Chinese themselves from the ancient to the present. Still, its cryptic text is elusive to the scholar and the common nowadays. Since Fuxi legendarily devised the eight trigrams, King Wen and his son, the Duke of Zhou in the Western Zhou period (1000–750 BCE) wrote the hexagram and line judgments. At length, Confucius and his disciples compiled the Ten Wings to Yijing, the core text of The Book of Changes, which has been completed into the modern version, a complex semiotic system called Zhouyi in about 136 BCE. Since Fuxi and the sages afterward continued supplementing its complicities, the Book of Changes, replete with signifiers, has long been implemented as a scripture of divination, especially in the royal seeking for auspices of wars, weddings, rituals, etc.

So elusive and obscure is the core text of the Book of Changes that the mystic scripture eludes the ancient sages and modern scholars. Hence, every era has its way of interpreting or divine via the hexagrams and its core text. This significant diversity of divination, from casting coins out of empty turtle shells to using poker cards nowadays, and its loose and wild interpretation derived from various schools greatly complicate the Book of Changes. The paper traces back to the ancient texts, stories, and anecdotes, which demonstrate how official diviners of the royal resorted to the Book of Changes to interpret auspices or ominousness of their actions and choices and how the general public nowadays employs the hexagram utterly different from the origin to interpret their daily life.