I wrote out a translation of the Yi King, embracing both the Text and the Appendixes, in 1854 and 1855; and have to acknowledge that when the manuscript was completed, I knew very little about the scope and method of the book. I laid the volumes containing the result of my labour aside, and hoped, believed indeed, that the light would by and by dawn and that I should one day get hold of a clue that would guide me to a knowledge of the mysterious classic.
Before that day came, the translation was soaked, in 1870, for more than a month in water of the Red Sea. By dint of careful manipulation it was recovered so as to be still legible; but it was not till 1874 that I began to be able to give to the book the prolonged attention necessary to make it reveal its secrets. Then for the first time I got hold, as I believe, of the clue, and found that my toil of twenty years before was of no service at all.
What had tended more than anything else to hide the nature of the book from my earlier studies was the way in which, with the Text, ordinarily and, as I think, correctly ascribed to king Wan and his son Tan, there are inter- spersed, under each hexagram, the portions of the Appen- dixes I, II, and IV relating to it. The student at first thinks this an advantage. He believes that all the Appen- dixes were written by Confucius, and combine with the Text to form one harmonious work; and he is glad to have the sentiments of ‘the three sages’ brought together. But I now perceived that the composition of the Text and of the Appendixes, allowing the Confucian authorship of the latter, was separated by’ about 700 years, and that their subject-matter was often incongruous. My first step towards a right understanding of the Yi was to study the Text by itself and as complete in itself. It was easy to X1V PREFACE.
do this because the imperial edition of 1715, with all its critical apparatus, keeps the Text and the Appendixes separate.
The wisdom of the course thus adopted became more apparent by the formation of eight different concordances, one for the Text, and one for each of the Appendixes. They showed that many characters in the Appendixes, and those especially which most readily occur to sino- logists as characteristic of the Yi, are not to be found in the Text at all. A fuller acquaintance, moreover, with the tone and style of the Appendixes satisfied me that while we had sufficient evidence that the greater part of them was not from Confucius, we had no evidence that any part was his, unless it might be the paragraphs intro- duced by the compiler or compilers as sayings of ‘the Master.’
Studying the Text in the manner thus described, I soon arrived at the view of the meaning and object of the Yi, which I have described in the second chapter of the Intro- duction; and I was delighted to find that there was a substantial agreement between my interpretations of the hexagrams and their several lines and those given by the most noted commentators from the Han dynasty down to the present. They have not formulated the scheme so con- cisely as I have done, and they were fettered by their belief in the Confucian authorship of the Appendixes; but they held the same general opinion, and were similarly controlled by it in construing the Text. Any sinologist who will examine the Yii Kih 74h Kiang Yi King Kieh I, prepared by one of the departments of the Han Lin college, and published in 1682, and which I have called the ‘Daily Lessons,’ or ‘ Lectures,’ will see the agreement between my views and those underlying its paraphrase.
After the clue to the meaning of the Yi was discovered, there remained the difficulty of translating. The pecu- liarity of its style makes it the most difficult of all the Confucian classics to present in an intelligible version. I suppose that there are sinologists who will continue, for a time at least, to maintain that it was intended by its PREFACE. XV a author or authors, whoever they were, merely as a book of divination; and of course the oracles of divination were designedly wrapped up in mysterious phraseology. But notwithstanding the account of the origin of the book and its composition by king Wan and his son, which I have seen reason to adopt, they, its authors, had to write after the manner of diviners. There is hardly another work in the ancient literature of China that presents the same difficulties to the translator.
When I made my first translation of it in 1854, I endea- voured to be as concise in my English as the original Chinese was. Much of what I wrote was made up, in consequence, of so many English words, with little or no mark of syntactical connexion. I followed in this the example of P. Regis and his coadjutors (Introduction, page g) in their Latin version. But their version is all but unintelligible, and mine was not less so. How to surmount this difficulty occurred to me after I had found the clue to the interpretation;—in a fact which I had unconsciously acted on in all my translations of other classics, namely, that the written characters of the Chinese are not repre- sentations of words, but symbols of ideas, and that the combination of them in composition is not a representation of what the writer would say, but of what he thinks. It is vain therefore for a translator to attempt a literal version. When the symbolic characters have brought his mind en rapport with that of his author, he is free to render the ideas in his own or any other speech in the best manner that he can attain to. This is the rule which Mencius followed in interpreting the old poems of his country:— ‘We must try with our thoughts to meet the scope of a sentence, and then we shall apprehend it. In the study of a Chinese classical book there is not so much an inter- pretation of the characters employed by the writer as a participation of his thoughts;—there is the seeing of mind to mind. The canon hence derived for a translator is not one of license. It will be his object to express the meaning of the original as exactly and concisely as possible. But ‘it will be necessary for him to introduce a word or two XVI PREFACE.
now and then to indicate what the mind of the writer supplied for itself. What I have done in this way will generally be seen enclosed in parentheses, though I queried whether I might not dispense with them, as there is nothing in the English version which was not, I believe. present in the writer's thought. I hope, however, that I have been able in this way to make the translation intel- ligible to readers. If, after all, they shall conclude that in what is said on the hexagrams there is often ‘much ado about nothing,’ it is not the translator who should be deemed accountable for that, but his original.
I had intended to append to the volume translations of certain chapters from A Hsi and other writers of the Sung dynasty; but this purpose could not be carried into effect for want of space. It was found necessary to accompany the version with a running commentary, illustrating the way in which the teachings of king Wan and his son are supposed to be drawn from the figures and their several lines; and my difficulty was to keep the single Yi within the limits of one volume. Those intended translations therefore are reserved for another opportunity; and indeed. the Sung philosophy did not grow out of the Yi proper, but from the Appendixes to it, and especially from the third of them. It is more Taoistic than Confucian.
When I first took the Yi in hand, there existed no trans- lation of it in any western language but that of P. Regis and his coadjutors, which I have mentioned above and in various places of the Introduction. The authors were all sinologists of great attainments; and their view of the Text as relating to the transactions between the founders of the A’au dynasty and the last sovereign of the Shang or Yin, and capable of being illustrated historically, though too Narrow, was an approximation to the truth. The late M. Mohl, who had edited the work in 1834, said to me once, ‘I like it; for I come to it out of a sea of mist, and find solid ground.’ No sufficient distinction was made in it, however, between the Text and the Appendixes; and in dis- cussing the third and following Appendixes the translators PREFACE. ca ex were haunted by the name and shade of Confucius. To the excessive literalness of the version I have referred above.
In 1876 the Rev. Canon McClatchie, M.A., published a version at Shanghai with the title,‘ A Translation of the Confucian Yi King, or the “Classic of Changes,’ with Notes and Appendix.’ This embraces both the Text and the Appendixes, the first, second, and fourth of the latter being interspersed along with the Text, as in the - ordinary school editions of the classic. So far as I can judge from his language, he does not appear to be aware that the first and second Appendixes were not the work of king Wan and the duke of K4u, but of a subsequent writer—he would say of Confucius—explaining their expla- nations of the entire hexagrams and their several lines. His own special object was ‘to open the mysteries of the Yi by applying to it the key of Comparative Mythology.’ Such a key was not necessary; and the author, by the application of it, has found sundry things to which I have occasionally referred in my notes. They are not pleasant to look at or dwell upon; and happily it has never entered into the minds of Chinese scholars to conceive of them. I have followed Canon McClatchie’s translation from para- sraph to paragraph and from sentence to sentence, but from nothing which I could employ with advantage in my own.
Long after my translation had been completed, and that of the Text indeed was printed, I received from Shanghai the third volume of P. Angelo Zottoli’s ‘Cursus Littera- turae Sinicae,’ which had appeared in 1880. About 100 pages of it are occupied with the Yi. The Latin version is a great improvement on that in the work of Regis; but P. Zottoli translates only the Text of the first two hexagrams, with the portions of the first, second, and fourth Appendixes relating to them; and other six hexagrams with the expla- nations of king Wan’s Thwan and of the Great Symbolism. Of the remaining fifty-six hexagrams only the briefest summary is given; and then follow the Appendixes III, V, VI, and VII at length. The author has done his work well.
XVIll_. PREFACE.
His general view of the Yi is stated in the following sen- tences:—‘ Ex Ff-hsi figuris, Wan regis definitionibus, Kau ducis symbolis, et Confucii commentariis, Liber conficitur, qui a mutationibus, quas duo elementa in hexagrammatum compositione inducunt, Yi (Mutator) vel Yi King (Muta- tionum Liber) appellatur. Quid igitur tandem famosus iste Yi King? Paucis accipe: ex linearum qualitate continua vel intercisa; earumque situ, imo, medio, vel supremo; mutuaque ipsarum relatione, occursu, dissidio, convenientia; ex ipso scilicet trigrammatum corpore seu forma, tum ex trigrammatum symbolo seu imagine, tum ex trigrammatum proprietate seu virtute, tum etiam aliquando ex unius ad alterum hexagramma varietate, eruitur aliqua imago, deducitur aliqua sententia, quoddam veluti ora- culum continens, quod sorte etiam consulere possis ad documentum obtinendum, moderandae vitae solvendove dubio consentaneum. Ita liber juxta Confucii explica- tionem in scholis tradi solitam. Nil igitur sublime aut mysteriosum, nil foedum aut vile hic quaeras; argutulum potius lusum ibi video ad instructiones morales politicas- que eliciendas, ut ad satietatem usque in Sinicis passim classicis, obvias, planas, naturales; tantum, cum liber iste, ut integrum legenti textum facile patebit, ad sortilegii usum deductus fuerit, per ipsum jam summum homo obtinebit vitae beneficium, arcanam cum spiritibus communicationem secretamque futurorum eventuum cognitionem; theurgus igitur visus est iste liber, totus lux, totus spiritus, hominis- que vitae accommodatissimus; indeque laudes a Confucio ei tributas, prorsus exaggeratas, in hujus libri praesertim appendice videre erit, si vere tamen, ut communis fert opinio, ipse sit hujus appendicis auctor.’
There has been a report for two or three years of a new translation of the Yi, or at least of a part of it, as being in preparation by M. Terrien de Lacouperie, and Professor R. K. Douglas of the British Museum and King’s College, London. I have alluded on pages 8, 9 of the Introduction to some inaccurate statements about native commentaries on the Yi and translations of it by foreigners, made in con- nexion with this contemplated version. But I did not know PREFACE. XIX PREFACE. XIX what the projected undertaking really was, till I read a letter from M. Terrien in the ‘Athenzum’ of the 21st January of this year. He there says that the joint translation ‘deals only with the oldest part of the book, the short lists of characters which follow each of the sixty-four headings, and leaves entirely aside the explanations and commen- taries attributed to Wen Wang, K4u Kung, Confucius, and others, from 1200 B. C. downwards, which are commonly embodied as an integral part of the classic; adding, ‘ The proportion of the primitive text to these additions is about one-sixth of the whole. But if we take away these expla- nations and commentaries attributed to king Wan, the duke of Kau, and Confucius, we take away the whole Yi. There remain only the linear figures attributed to Fii-hsi, without any lists of characters, long or short, without a single written character of any kind whatever. The projectors have been misled somehow about the contents of the Yi; and unless they can overthrow all the traditions and beliefs about them, whether Chinese or foreign, their undertaking is more hopeless than the task laid on the children of Israel by Pharaoh, that they should make bricks without straw.
I do not express myself thus in any spirit of hostility. If, by discoveries in Accadian or any other long-buried and forgotten language, M. Terrien de Lacouperie can throw new light on the written characters of China or on its speech, no one will rejoice more than myself; but his ignorance of how the contents of the classic are made up does not give much prospect of success in his promised translation.
In the preface to the third volume of these ‘Sacred Books of the East,’ containing the Shad King, Shih King, and Hsido King, I have spoken of the Chinese terms Ti and Shang Ti, and shown how I felt it necessary to con- tinue to render them by our word God, as I had done in all my translations of the Chinese classics since 1861. My doing so gave offence to some of the missionaries in China and others; and in June, 1880, twenty-three gentlemen addressed a letter to Professor F. Max Miiller, complaining XX PREFACE.
that, in such a work edited by him, he should allow me to give my own private interpretation of the name or names in question instead of translating them or transferring them. Professor Miiller published the letter which he had received, with his reply to it, in the ‘Times’ newspaper of Dec. 30, 1880. Since then the matter has rested, and I introduce it again here in this preface, because, though we do not meet with the name in the Yi so frequently as in the Sha and Shih, I have, as before, wherever it does occur, translated it by God. Those who object to that term say that Shang Ti might be rendered by ‘Supreme Ruler’ or ‘Supreme Emperor, or by ‘ Ruler (or Emperor) on high;’ but when I examined the question, more than thirty years ago, with all possible interest and all the resources at my command, I came to the conclusions that Ti, on its first employment by the Chinese fathers, was intended to ex- press the same concept which our fathers expressed by God, and that such has been its highest and proper application ever since. There would be little if any difference in the meaning conveyed to readers by ‘Supreme Ruler’ and ‘God;’ but when I render Ti by God and Shang Ti by the Supreme God, or, for the sake of brevity, simply by God, I am translating, and not giving a private inter- pretation of my own. I do it not in the interests of con- troversy, but as the simple expression of what to me is truth; and I am glad to know that a great majority of the Protestant missionaries in China use Ti and Shang Ti as the nearest analogue for God.
It would be tedious to mention the many critical editions and commentaries that I have used in preparing the trans- lation. I have not had the help of able native scholars, which saved time and was otherwise valuable when I was working in the East on other classics. The want of this, however, has been more than compensated in some respects by my copy of the ‘ Daily Lectures on the Yi, the full title of which is given on page xiv. The friend who purchased it for me five years ago in Canton was obliged to content himself with a second-hand copy; but I found that the PREFACE. XX1 previous owner had been a ripe scholar who freely used his pencil in pursuing his studies. It was possible, from his punctuation, interlineations, and many marginal notes, to follow the exercises of his mind, patiently pursuing his search for the meaning of the most difficult passages. I am under great obligations to him; and also to the Kau Yi Keh Kung, the great imperial edition of the present dynasty, first published in 1715. I have generally spoken of its authors as the Khang-hsi editors. Their numerous discussions of the meaning, and ingenious decisions, go far to raise the interpretation of the Yi to a science.
Teste OxForD, 16th March, 1882.
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” F fi Gis Tels Hates Yalan ale NIG OR BOON WOon GrlAyNiGebs: ENERO D UGLION: CHAPTER I.
THE Yi KING FROM THE TWELFTH CENTURY B.C. TO THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA.
1. Confucius is reported to have said on one occasion, ‘ If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the ‘There was a Study of the Yi, and might then escape falling Yiintbetime into great errors’ The utterance is repS patna ferred by the best critics to the closing period of Confucius’ life, when he had returned from his long and painful wanderings among the States, and was settled again in his native La. By this time he was nearly seventy, and it seems strange, if he spoke seriously, that he should have thought it possible for his lifeto be prolonged other fifty years. So far as that specification is concerned, a corruption of the text is generally admitted. My reason for adducing the passage has simply been to prove from it the existence of a Yi King in the time of Confucius. In the history of him by Sze-m4 Khien it is stated that, in the closing years of his life, he became fond of the Yi, and wrote various appendixes to it, that he read his copy of it so much that the leathern thongs (by which the tablets containing it were bound together) were thrice worn out, and that he said, ‘Give me several years (more),-and I should be master of the Yi?” The ancient books on which Confucius had delighted 1 Confucian Analects, VII, xvi. * The Historical Records; Life of Confucius, p. 12.
2 THE Yi KING. CH. I.
to discourse with his disciples were those of History, Poetry, and Rites and Ceremonies!; but ere he passed away from among them, his attention was much occupied also by the Yi as a monument of antiquity, which in the prime of his days he had too much neglected.
2. Khien says that Confucius wrote various appendixes to the Yi, specifying all but two of the treatises, which go by the name of ‘the Ten Appendixes, and The Yi is now;::;; made up of are, with hardly a dissentient voice, attributed Ms ane which to the sage. They are published along with oniucius saw *. and the Ap- the older Text, which is based on still older Pek lineal figures, and are received by most Chinese readers, as well as by foreign Chinese scholars, as an integral portion of the Yi King. The two portions should, however, be carefully distinguished. I will speak of them as the Text and the Appendixes.
3. The Yi happily escaped the fires of 3hin, which proved so disastrous to most of the ancient literature of China in The Vies- B:C- 213. In the memorial which the premier caped the fires Tj Sze addressed to his sovereign, advising of Shin. that the old books should be consigned to the flames, an exception was made of those which treated of ‘medicine, divination, and husbandry”. The Yi was held to be a book of divination, and so was preserved.
In the catalogue of works in the imperial library, pre- pared by Lid Hin about the beginning of our era, there is an enumeration of those on the Yi and its Appendixes,— the books of thirteen different authors or schools, com- prehended in 294 portions of larger or smaller dimensions *. I need not follow the history and study of the Yi into the lineof the centuries since the time of Lid Hin. The imperial Khang-hsi edition of it, which appeared in 1715, contains quotations from the commentaries of 218 scholars, covering, more or less closely, the time from the second century B.c. to our seventeenth century. I may venture to say that 1 Analects, VII, xvii. 2 Legge’s Chinese Classics, I, prolegomena, pp. 6-9. $ Books of the Earlier Han; History of Literature, pp. 1, 2.
CH. 1. INTRODUCTION. 3 those 218 are hardly a tenth of the men who have tried to interpret the remarkable book, and solve the many problems to which it gives rise. 4. It may be assumed then that the Yi King, properly so called, existed before Confucius, and has The Yi before x Confucius, Come down to us as correctly as any other and when it of the ancient books of China; and it might was made. f also be said, as correctly as any of the old monuments of Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, or Latin literature. The question arises of how far before Confucius we can trace its existence. Of course an inquiry into this point will not include the portions or appendixes attributed to the sage himself. Attention will be called to them by and by, when I shall consider how far we are entitled, or whether we are at all entitled, to ascribe them to him. I do not doubt, however, that they belong to what may be called the Confucian period, and were produced some time after his death, probably between B.C. 450 and 350. By whom- soever they were written, they may be legitimately em- ployed in illustration of what were the prevailing views in that age on various points connected with the Yi. Indeed, but for the guidance and hints derived from them as to the meaning of the text, and the relation between its statements and the linear figures, there would be great difficulty in making out any consistent interpretation of it. (i) The earliest mention of the classic is found in the The Yi men- Official Book of the Aau dynasty, where it ee ocd is said that, among the duties of ‘the Grand of Kau. Diviner,’ ‘he had charge of the rules for the three Yi (systems of Changes), called the Lien-shan, the K wei-zhang, and the Yi of Aau; that in each of them the regular (or primary) lineal figures were 8, which were mul- tiplied, in each, till they amounted to 64.’ The date of the Official Book has not been exactly ascertained. The above passage can hardly be reconciled with the opinion of the majority of Chinese critics that it was the work of the duke of KAu, the consolidator and legislator of the dynasty so called; but I think there must have been the groundwork of it at a very early date. When that was composed or compiled, there 4 THE YI KING. cH? Ts was existing, among the archives of the kingdom, under the charge of a high officer, ‘the Yi of Aau,—what constitutes the Text of the present Yi; the Text, that is,as distinguished from the Appendixes. There were two other Yi, known as the Lien-shan and the Kwei-jhang. It would be a waste of time to try to discover the meaning of these designations. They are found in this and another passage of the Official Book; and nowhere else. Not a single trace of what they denoted remains, while we possess ‘the Yi of Kau’ complete’. (ii) In the Supplement of 30 A/it-ming to ‘the Spring The Yi men. 22d Autumn,’ there is abundant evidence that tioned in the divination by the Yi was frequent, throughout peidiepan: the states of China, before the time of Con- fucius. There are at least eight narratives of such a practice, between the years B.C. 672 and 564, before he was born; and five times during his life-time the divining stalks and the book were had recourse to on occasions with which he had nothing to do. In all these cases the text of the Yi,as wehave it now, is freely quoted. The ‘ Spring and Autumn’ commences in B.C. 722. If it extended back to the rise of the Kau dynasty, we should, no doubt, find 1 See the Xau Kwan (or Li), Book XXIV, parr. 3, 4, and 27. Biot (Le Tcheou 11, vol. ii, pp. 70, 71) translates the former two paragraphs thus:— ‘Il (Le Grand Augure) est préposé aux trois methodes pour les changements (des lignes divinatoires). La premiere est appelée Liaison des montagnes (Lien-shan); la seconde, Retour et Conservation (Kwei-zhang); la troisi¢me, Changements des Aau. Pour toutes il y a huit lignes symboliques sacrées, et soixante-quatre combinaisons de ces lignes.’
Some tell us that by Lien-shan was intended Fii-hsi, and by Kwei-zhang Hwang T1; others, that the former was the Yi of the Hsia dynasty, and the latter that of Shang or Yin. A third set will have it that Lien-shan was a designation of Shan Nang, between Ffi-hsi and Hwang Ti. I should say myself, as many Chinese critics do say, that Lien-shan was an arrangement of the lineal symbols in which the first figure was the present 52nd hexagram, Kan = _ =, consisting of the trigram representing mountains doubled; and that Kwei- zhang was an arrangement where the first figure was the present 2nd hexagram, Khwan == =, consisting of the trigram representing the earth doubled,— ee ee with reference to the disappearance and safe keeping of plants in the bosom of the earth in winter. All this, however, is only conjecture.
CH. I. INTRODUCTION, 5 accounts of divination by the Yi interspersed over the long intervening period. For centuries before Confucius appeared on the stage of his country, the Yi was well known among the various feudal states, which then constituted the Middle Kingdom 1.
(iii) We may now look into one of the Appendixes for its testimony to the age and authorship of the Text. The third Appendix is the longest, and the most important *. In the 49th paragraph of the second Section of it it is said:— ‘Was it not in the middle period of antiquity that the Yi began to flourish? Was not he who made it (or were not they who made it) familiar with anxiety and calamity?’
The highest antiquity commences, according to Chinese writers, with Fd-hsi, B.C. 3322; and the lowest with Con- fucius in the middle of the sixth century B.C. Between these is the period of middle antiquity, extending a com- paratively short time, from the rise of the Kau dynasty, towards the close of the twelfth century B.C., to the Con- fucian era. According to this paragraph it was in this period that our Yi was made.
The 69th paragraph isstill more definite in its testimony:— ‘Was it not in the last age of the Yin (dynasty), when the virtue of Kau had reached its highest point, and during the troubles be- tween king WAn and (the tyrant) Aau, that (the study of) the Yi began to flourish? On this account the explanations (in the book) express (a feeling of) anxious apprehension, (and teach) how peril may be turned into security, and easy carelessness is sure to mect with overthrow.’
The dynasty of Yin was superseded by that of Aau in B.C. 1122. The founder of Kau was he whom we call king Wan, though he himself never occupied the throne. The 1 See in the 30 AAwan, under the 22nd year of duke Awang (B.C. 672); the Ist year of Min (661); and in his 2nd year (660); twice in the 15th year of Hs? (645); his 25th year (635); the 12th year of Hsiian (597); the 16th year of Ahang (575); the yth year of Hsiang (564); his 25th year (548); the 5th year of Ahao (537); his 7th year (535); his 12th year (530); and the gth year * That is, the third as it appears farther on in this volume in two Sections. With the Chinese critics it forms the fifth and sixth Appendixes, or ‘ Wings,’ as they are termed.
6 THE Yi KING. CH. I.
troubles between him and the last sovereign of Yin reached their height in B.C. 1143, when the tyrant threw him into prison in a place called Yd-li, identified as having been in the present district of Thang-yin, department of Kang-teh, province of Ho-nan. Wan was not kept long in confinement. His friends succeeded in appeasing the jealousy of his enemy, and securing his liberation in the following year. It follows that the Yi, so far as we owe it to king Wan, was made in the year B.C. 1143 or 1142, or perhaps that it was begun in the former year and finished in the latter '.
But the part which is thus ascribed to king Wan is only a small portion of the Yi. A larger share is attributed to his son Tan, known as the duke of Kau, and in it we have allusions to king Wd, who succeeded his father Wan, and was really the first sovereign of the dynasty of Kau’. There are passages, moreover, which must be understood of events in the early years of the next reign. But the duke of Kau died in the year B.C. 1105, the 11th of king Khang. A few years then before that time, in the last decade of the twelfth century B.C., the Yi King, as it has come down to us, was complete ®.