It has been recorded that since the pre-Qin and Han dynasties, there have been no fewer than three thousand works related to the Book of Changes or Yijing, with over a thousand commentaries from various periods. In the 1990s, the Shandong Provincial Library conducted a survey on the total number of Yijing texts, revealing that according to historical bibliographies, there were approximately 6000 Yijing texts before the Republic of China period; by 1990, there were 2810 extant Yijing texts published or written before that time (the actual number of surviving texts should be higher). Almost every fundamental concept, category, proposition, and even the specific explanations of individual hexagrams and lines in the Zhouyi or Yijing have been subject to diverse and contentious interpretations throughout history, a trend that persists into modern times. Below are just a few examples to illustrate the complexity of Yijing studies.
1. Concerning the Taiji
The “Yi Zhuan” is a Confucian commentary and elaboration on the Yijing. “Taiji” is the most fundamental concept in Yijing studies. However, for two thousand years, scholars have interpreted the phrase “Yi has Taiji, which gives birth to two principles, the two principles give birth to four phenomena, the four phenomena give birth to eight trigrams, and the eight trigrams determine auspiciousness and inauspiciousness, which in turn give birth to great undertakings” in various and often conflicting ways. Mr. Zhang Dainian enumerated four different interpretations of “Yi has Taiji” in history: firstly, the theory of the origin of heaven and earth, represented by Zheng Xuan and Yu Fan; secondly, the hexagram drawing theory, represented by Zhu Xi; thirdly, the divination by yarrow stalks theory, represented by Hu Wei and Li Shou; fourthly, the theory of the great central harmony, represented by Jiao Xun. People rely on gossip to determine auspiciousness and adversity, guiding their actions, and thus achieving all things and phenomena. There are also amalgamations of two seemingly incompatible views. For instance, Mr. Gao Huaimin believes that on one hand, Taiji, together with the Two Principles, Four Symbols, and Eight Trigrams, constitutes a fundamental category of divination, used to denote the unseparated state of the Great Extremes and as the original source of the Sixty-Four Hexagrams. From this perspective, it lacks philosophical significance. On the other hand, Taiji contains the implications of cosmogony and cosmology, revealing a basic pattern of cosmological generation, which imbues it with philosophical significance, making it a philosophical category. The reason for this is that the “Commentary on the Book of Changes” considers the Book of Changes as a divination book capable of predicting the future and determining auspiciousness and adversity. The Book of Changes can predict the future and determine auspiciousness and adversity because it is a microcosm of the entire universe, and the mysteries of the existence, development, and changes of the entire universe and world are contained within it. Mr. Wang Shusen, on the other hand, states, “The author of the ‘Appended Remarks’ ingeniously employs semantic ambiguity, succinctly expressing the viewpoint on the origin of heaven and earth while also revealing the process of the generation of the Eight Trigrams.” The concept of ‘Tai Chi’ refers to the primordial essence of the universe, and in connection with the subsequent ‘Eight Trigrams,’ it also encompasses the unsplit bamboo stalks used in divination, akin to the slender bamboo rods in the Yi ethnic group’s divination practices in Sichuan Province. The term ‘Two Principles’ denotes not only the heavens and the earth but also the bamboo stalks grasped in each hand after they have been divided into two during the divination process. This constitutes the initial outcome of divination. The notion of ‘Two Principles giving rise to Four Symbols’ mirrors the statement in the “Book of Rites, Chapter on the Evolution of Rites,” which asserts that “rites must originate from the Ultimate, divide to become heaven and earth, rotate to become yin and yang, and change to become the four seasons,” embodying the cosmogonic significance. The ‘Four Symbols’ can also be understood as the four possible outcomes of subsequent divinations… Following the principle of thrice casting, if divination is performed thrice, there could be eight possible scenarios… These scenarios, when symbolically recorded, constitute the ‘Four Symbols giving rise to Eight Trigrams.’ The so-called Bagua of Fu Xi, with three lines per trigram, is indeed a record of the various results obtained from thrice casting.” (From “The Book of Changes and Chinese Culture” by Wang Shulin, published by Workers’ Publishing House, June 1993 edition, page 11).
