Yijing

Yijing or I Ching (Chinese, Book of Changes), ancient Chinese book, one of the classics of Confucianism, used for divination and as a moral, philosophical, and cosmological text. It is based on 64 symbolic hexagrams, each consisting of a pair of trigrams which are made up of three parallel lines. The lines can be either solid (representing the yang, or active principle) or broken (representing the yin, or passive principle), following early Chinese cosmology, which explained all phenomena in terms of alternation of yin and yang. There are eight basic trigrams, each named after a natural phenomenon, and the full 64 hexagrams exhaust all possible combinations of the six lines. The book is consulted by dividing up and counting off 50 stalks of the supposedly magical yarrow plant, or by tossing coins, yielding numbers that give the lines for the resulting hexagram. The numbers determine whether each line is yin or yang, and whether it is “still” or “moving” (about to change into its opposite). The hexagrams are thus envisaged as perpetually changing into each other, following the cyclical order of the universe.

The hexagrams evolved as fortune-telling symbols. Legend tells that the mythical god-emperor Fuxi (fl. c. 2400 bc) discovered the eight trigrams on the back of a sacred tortoise. (The earliest Chinese diviners foretold the future by burning holes in bones or tortoise shells and examining the resulting cracks, which perhaps inspired the lines of the Yijing.) The symbolic significance of each hexagram is expressed in cryptic poetic passages and in philosophical commentary. The oldest parts of the book date back to the early Zhou dynasty. Wen Wang (fl. c. 1150 bc) is traditionally thought to have added moral counsel to the original divinatory hexagrams. Confucius and his followers probably added further philosophical commentary, as he reportedly revered the Yijing. Lucky hexagrams from the Yijing are often used in Chinese arts.