#I CHING PDF MANUAL#

There is also an ancient folk etymology that sees the character for 'changes' as containing the sun and moon, the cycle of the day. Feng Youlan proposed that the word for 'changes' originally meant 'easy', as in a form of divination easier than the oracle bones, but there is little evidence for this. The 'changes' involved have been interpreted as the transformations of hexagrams, of their lines, or of the numbers obtained from the divination. The name Zhou yi literally means the 'changes' ( 易 Yì) of the Zhou dynasty. It is possible that other divination systems existed at this time the Rites of Zhou name two other such systems, the Lianshan and the Guicang. A copy of the text in the Shanghai Museum corpus of bamboo and wooden slips (discovered in 1994) shows that the Zhou yi was used throughout all levels of Chinese society in its current form by 300 BC, but still contained small variations as late as the Warring States period (c. Based on a comparison of the language of the Zhou yi with dated bronze inscriptions, the American sinologist Edward Shaughnessy dated its compilation in its current form to the last quarter of the 9th century BC, during the early decades of the reign of King Xuan of Zhou ( r. c. Various modern scholars suggest dates ranging between the 10th and 4th centuries BC for the assembly of the text in approximately its current form. The core of the I Ching is a Western Zhou divination text called the Changes of Zhou ( Chinese: 周易 pinyin: Zhōu yì). The hexagrams themselves have often acquired cosmological significance and been paralleled with many other traditional names for the processes of change such as yin and yang and Wu Xing. Many commentators have used the book symbolically, often to provide guidance for moral decision making as informed by Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The interpretation of the readings found in the I Ching has been endlessly discussed and debated over the centuries. The hexagrams are arranged in an order known as the King Wen sequence. Each of the 64 possible sets corresponds to a hexagram, which can be looked up in the text. Īs a divination text, the I Ching is used for a traditional Chinese form of cleromancy known as I Ching divination, in which bundles of yarrow stalks are manipulated to produce sets of six apparently random numbers ranging from 6 to 9. After becoming part of the Five Classics in the 2nd century BC, the I Ching was the subject of scholarly commentary and the basis for divination practice for centuries across the Far East, and eventually took on an influential role in Western understanding of East Asian philosophical thought.

#I CHING PDF MANUAL#

Originally a divination manual in the Western Zhou period (1000–750 BC), the I Ching was transformed over the course of the Warring States and early imperial periods (500–200 BC) into a cosmological text with a series of philosophical commentaries known as the ' Ten Wings'.

The I Ching or Yi Jing ( Chinese: 易經, Mandarin: ( listen)), usually translated Book of Changes or Classic of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. ' I (Ching)' in seal script (top), Traditional (middle), and Simplified (bottom) Chinese characters