Unearthing the Changes

Recently Discovered Manuscripts of the Yi Jing (I Ching) and Related Texts

Edward Shaughnessy

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231533300
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

In recent years, three ancient manuscripts relating to the Yi jin g ( I Ching ), or Classic of Changes, have been discovered. The earliest—the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi—dates to about 300 B.C.E. and shows evidence of the text's original circulation. The Guicang, or Returning to Be Stored, reflects another ancient Chinese divination tradition based on hexagrams similar to those of the Yi jing. In 1993, two manuscripts were found in a third-century B.C.E. tomb at Wangjiatai that contain almost exact parallels to the Guicang 's early quotations, supplying new information on the performance of early Chinese divination. Finally, the Fuyang Zhou Y i was excavated from the tomb of Xia Hou Zao, lord of Ruyin, who died in 165 B.C.E. Each line of this classic is followed by one or more generic prognostications similar to phrases found in the Yi jing, indicating exciting new ways the text was produced and used in the interpretation of divinations.

Unearthing the Changes details the discovery and significance of the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi, the Wangjiatai Guicang, and the Fuyang Zhou Yi, including full translations of the texts and additional evidence constructing a new narrative of the Yi jing 's writing and transmission in the first millennium B.C.E. An introduction situates the role of archaeology in the modern attempt to understand the Classic of Changes. By showing how the text emerged out of a popular tradition of divination, these newly unearthed manuscripts reveal an important religious dimension to its evolution.

I

DIVINING THE PAST DIVINING THE FUTURE: ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE REDISCOVERY OF THE CHANGES

In the West, the Changes, or Classic of Changes (hereafter simply Changes), is best known through the translation done by the German missionary Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930).¹ Wilhelm lived in China for twenty years at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, witnessing firsthand the fall of China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911), and the fledgling creation of a new republican government. During this time, he came to be a fervent admirer of China’s native traditions, especially Confucian thought, and established the Confucian Society in his adopted city of Qingdao 青島 in eastern China’s Shandong province. In 1913, Wilhelm began to work with the Chinese scholar Lao Naixuan 勞乃宣 (1843–1921) on his translation of the Changes. Lao had been an official under the Qing dynasty, which had been overthrown just two years before, and had sought refuge in the German protectorate.² There he taught Wilhelm the dominant Song-dynasty interpretation of the Changes as a guide to life, an interpretation that Wilhelm succeeded brilliantly in translating into German. The famous first words of Qian 乾

A hexagram, the first of the text, yuan heng li zhen 元亨利貞, which literally mean something like “first enjoy benefit divination,” became in Wilhelm’s German “Das Schöpferische wirkt erhabenes Gelingen, fördernd durch Beharrlichkeit,” or, in the English translation by Cary F. Baynes, “The Creative works sublime success, Furthering through perseverance.”³ The English translation, in particular, furnished with an introduction by Wilhelm’s friend C. G. Jung (1875–1961) explaining the Changes as a product of the collective unconscious, became something of a bible for the postwar counterculture generation. It is said that until the vogue of professors becoming television personalities in the 1980s, Wilhelm’s translation of the Changes was the best-selling book by any university press in America.

At the same time that Wilhelm was working on his Changes translation in Qingdao, a few hundred miles to the west another Western missionary interested in traditional Chinese culture was very much involved in work that would also come to transform our understanding of the Changes. James M. Menzies (1885–1957), a Canadian Presbyterian missionary living in Anyang 安陽, Henan, began collecting “dragon bones” that peasants there were busily unearthing.⁴ According to at least one tradition, these bones—actually pieces of the scapula bones of oxen and plastrons of turtles—had first come to the attention of the Chinese epigrapher Wang Yirong 王懿榮 (1845–1900) in 1899, the year that Richard Wilhelm had arrived in China, when Wang purchased them in a Beijing apothecary. He is supposed to have noticed writing on the bones similar to the inscriptions on ancient bronze vessels with which he was familiar, but still more ancient. He quickly purchased all the other bones that he could find in Beijing. When his collection was subsequently published, it set off a chase to find the source of the bones, which led within a few years to Anyang.⁵ This was significant because Anyang was known to have been the site of the last capital of the Shang dynasty (16th c.–1045 B.C.), the dynasty immediately preceding the Zhou dynasty of Wen Wang, Zhou Gong, and Confucius. Antiquarians and scholars alike descended on Anyang, setting off a digging craze among the peasants living there. For his part, Menzies explored particularly the village of Xiaotun 小屯 near Anyang, which, excavations would subsequently show, was the site of the Shang royal palace and cemeteries; during his time at Anyang, Menzies collected well over ten thousand pieces of oracle bone.⁶ When these and others were published,⁷ paleographers determined that the bones did indeed come from the Shang dynasty and that their inscriptions were records of divinations performed on behalf of the last kings of that dynasty.

One of the most important early interpretive breakthroughs came with the identification of the character

, which appeared among the first words of almost every inscription. Scholars noted that the character was sometimes written...