The I Ching

Open any hexagram in Legge's edition and the first thing on the page is not a sentence. It is a stack of six lines, some whole, some broken in the middle. The words sit underneath it.

That layout is the history of the book in miniature. The old Text, Legge notes, "says nothing about their origin and formation." The figures are simply there, and the writers take them up one after another. The figures came first, the words after: people were looking at these marks, and using them, long before anyone wrote down what each one meant.

So when we call the I Ching a book, we are describing its latest form. Before it was a book, it was a set of shapes that diviners laid out and read.

The book does tell a story about where the shapes came from, in one of its later appendixes. Fu Xi, the earliest ruler Chinese tradition remembers, looked up at the bright forms in the sky and down at the patterns on the earth. He studied the markings of birds and beasts, what each soil was suited for, his own body and things far away. Then he drew eight figures of three lines each.

Legge admits he cannot hold back his doubts that Fu Xi was ever a real person, and tradition places him more than three thousand years before Christ.

But notice what the legend gets right. It never says Fu Xi wrote anything. He watched the world and made marks to sort what he saw. Even the myth puts the drawing before the writing.

Getting from eight figures to sixty-four is less mysterious than it sounds. Start with two lines, one whole and one broken. Put each on top of each and you have four pairs. Add a third line and you have the eight trigrams. Keep doubling up to six lines and you arrive at sixty-four hexagrams.

Legge, who worked on this book for decades, is almost blunt about it: "This is all the mystery in the formation of the lineal figures." An ordinary person, he says, could have done it. No sage required.

Why stop at sixty-four instead of going on to figures of seven or eight lines? No Chinese writer ever explained it, he notes. His guess is practical: past sixty-four, the set simply becomes too many to write about one by one, the way the old authors did.

According to Legge, what does it actually take to build the sixty-four hexagrams?

• Copying the marks found on birds and beasts
• The rare insight of a sage like Fu Xi
• Stacking whole and broken lines, again and again✓Correct answer
• Charting sixty-four patterns in the night sky

Two lines give four pairs, then eight trigrams, then sixty-four hexagrams: plain doubling, which Legge says an ordinary person could manage. The birds, beasts and sky belong to the legend of Fu Xi's eight figures, not to the arithmetic.

The earliest mention of the Yi is not in a book of wisdom. It is in something closer to a civil-service manual: the Official Book of the Zhou dynasty (Legge spells it Kau), which lists the duties of the court's officers.

One of them is the Grand Diviner. He was in charge of the rules for three different Yi, each built on eight primary figures multiplied to sixty-four. Two had their own names, Lianshan and Guicang. The third was simply the Yi of Zhou, the one that became your book.

Picture what that means. Before it was a classic, the Yi was a toolkit kept by an official, and not even a single toolkit: a working system of figures, held by a specialist, in more than one version. The name itself means change, and these were systems of changes.

What happened to the other two? Legge's answer is short: not a single trace of them remains, while the Yi of Zhou has come down to us complete.

Chinese critics have guessed at what they were, and Legge leans toward one guess while calling it conjecture. The three systems may have used the same figures in a different order. Lianshan began with the mountain doubled. Guicang began with the earth doubled, as if things were being put safely away in the ground for winter. The Zhou version opens with heaven.

If that is right, it tells you something. The same sixty-four shapes could be arranged and read in rival ways. What set one system apart was not the marks, which all three shared, but where it began and what was said about each figure.