What the I Ching is

The Book of Changes is older than most things we are even willing to call ancient. Below is an excerpt from Part I of the book — on what the I Ching really is, and what it is not.

A book from three thousand years ago

The I Ching — the Book of Changes — is older than most things we are even willing to call "ancient." Its earliest layer, a text called the Zhouyi, took shape around the transition from the Shang to the Zhou dynasty, roughly in the 11th century BCE. By way of comparison, this predates Homer, predates the founding of Rome, and comes several centuries before the first written laws of Moses.

Tradition credits two figures from the house of Zhou with the key contribution. King Wen, said to have been imprisoned by the last ruler of the Shang dynasty, is said to have arranged the 64 hexagrams into the order we know today and given them their names during his captivity. His son, the Duke of Zhou, is said to have then added short, oracular commentaries to each line of every hexagram.

From court oracle to philosophical classic

For centuries the I Ching remained what it had started out as: a technical tool of divination, used mainly by the court and its priests to make decisions of state. The turning point came a few centuries later, when philosophical commentaries known as the Ten Wings began to be appended to the oracular text itself.

It was the Ten Wings that turned the I Ching from a divination manual into a philosophical treatise on the nature of change, the balance of yin and yang, and humanity's place between heaven and earth. That same layer of commentary also introduced a figure who recurs throughout the book: the junzi, the "noble one" — the book's intended reader and user, who consults the oracle not to surrender helplessly to fate, but to read a situation more clearly and act in accordance with it.

What the I Ching actually does

It isn't a book that predicts the future in a linear sense, the way a horoscope or tarot cards with their character archetypes do. The I Ching describes situations — 64 basic patterns of change that can occur in a human life: growth and decline, conflict and reconciliation, patience and action.

This distinction also determines how a question to the oracle should be framed in the first place — which the book takes up later on.