Prof. Tze-ki Hon: Divination and the Yijing hexagrams

Known in the West as a manual of divination, the Yijing (I Ching, Book of Changes) is a composite text consisting of three distinct layers: the sixty-four hexagrams, the hexagram statements, and the Ten Wings allegedly written by Confucius. For hundreds of years, these three layers of the Yijing had caused continuous debates among Chinese scholars over the meaning of the hexagrams. For those who focused on the first two layers, they believed that the hexagrams were signs of the constant changes in the natural and human worlds. For those who focused on the Ten Wings, they believed that the hexagrams were graphic illustrations of Confucius’s philosophy of living. In this paper, I will discuss how the Yijing scholars of fifteenth-century China resolved the controversy by creating a genealogy of sages who explained the uses of the hexagrams. The genealogy, I argue, made divination a learning of living.
Tze-ki Hon is a professor of Chinese history at SUNY Geneseo. Among his other work, he has written two books on the Book of Changes: „The Yijing and Chinese Politics: Classical Commentary and Literati Activism in the Northern Song Period“ and „Teaching the Book of Changes“.