History of the I Ching

Tradition attributes the discovery of the eight trigrams to the legendary Emperor Fu Xi, around the third millennium BCE. He is said to have observed the markings on the shell of a tortoise emerging from the Luo river, or the lines on the flank of a dragon-horse rising from the Yellow river, and to have recognised in them the fundamental grammar of the cosmos: eight configurations of three lines, each representing a primordial state — Heaven, Earth, Water, Fire, Thunder, Wind, Mountain, Lake.

This origin is mythical in the strong sense: no archaeological trace confirms it, but it expresses what the I Ching claims to be — not an arbitrary human invention, but a reading of structures already inscribed in nature.

The historical author of the I Ching as we know it is King Wen (11th century BCE), founder of the Zhou dynasty. Imprisoned by the last Shang sovereign in the Youli fortress, he is said to have, during his captivity, organised the 64 combinations of the eight trigrams into hexagrams and composed for each a short text — the "judgment".

His son, the Duke of Zhou, completed the work by adding a text for each of the six lines of each hexagram. This whole — 64 judgments plus 384 line texts — forms the canonical core of the I Ching.

Five centuries later, Confucius (551–479 BCE) is said to have devoted his old age to the study of the I Ching. Tradition attributes to him the Ten Wings — a set of ten philosophical commentaries that transform the oracular text into a classic of Chinese thought. The most famous, the commentary on the Four Virtues of Hexagram 1, develops the notions of origin, penetration, just advantage and perseverance.

The attribution to Confucius himself is today contested by modern philology — the Ten Wings are probably the work of the Confucian school over several generations. But the gesture remains: making the I Ching not a mere divinatory manual, but a wisdom text.

The I Ching reached Europe in the 17th century through the Jesuits. Joachim Bouvet, missionary in China, transmitted it to Leibniz who saw in the binary structure of yang/yin lines a foreshadowing of his own binary notation system — direct ancestor of modern computing.

But it is Richard Wilhelm's translation, published in German in 1923 and then in French and English in the 1950s, that turned the I Ching into a Western classic. Wilhelm, a German missionary turned sinologist, translated with a precision and elegance still unmatched.

Carl Gustav Jung wrote a preface to the English edition and theorised the casting experience through his concept of synchronicity: the meaningful coincidence between an inner event (the question) and an outer event (the cast). This preface durably opened the I Ching to Western depth psychology.

The I Ching continues to be practised around the world, in China as in the West. It has inspired artists (John Cage made it the backbone of his aleatoric musical composition), philosophers (François Jullien drew from it a reading of Chinese thought on change), entrepreneurs and political leaders.

Its modernity lies in its capacity to offer a reading that is neither superstition nor prediction, but mirror: a system of 64 configurations in which the present situation finds its echo and its orientation. Three thousand years after King Wen, it still speaks.