5. We have thus traced the text of the Yi to its authors, the famous king Wan in the year 1143 B.C., and his equally famous son, the duke of Kau, in between thirty and The Yiisnot forty years later. It can thus boast of a Bee great antiquity; but a general opinion has the Chinese prevailed that it belonged to a period still books, more distant. Only two translations of it have been made by European scholars. The first was executed by Regis and other Roman Catholic missionaries in the begin- ning of last century, though it was given to the public only 1 Sze-ma Xhien (History of the Aau Dynasty, p. 3) relates that, ‘when he was confined in Yfi-lf, Wan increased the 8 trigrams to 64 hexagrams.’
2 E.g., hexagrams XVII,1.6; XLVI, 1.4. Tan’s authorship of the symbolism is recognised in the 80 A/wan, B. C. 540.
3 P. Regis (vol. ii, p. 379) says: ‘ Vel nihil vel parum errabit qui dicet opus Yi King fuisse perfectum anno quinto Aang Wang, seu anno IIog aut non ultra annum 1108, ante aerae Christianae initium; quod satis in rebus non omnino certis.’ But the fifth year of king A#ang was B.C. III.
CH. I. INTRODUCTION. 7 in 1834 by the late Jules Mohl, with a title commencing ‘ Y- King, antiquissimus Sinarum liber?’ The language of the other European translator of it, the Rev. Canon McClatchie of Shanghai, whose work appeared in 1876, is still more decided. ‘The first sentence of his Introduction contains two very serious misstatements, but I have at present to do only with the former of them;—that ‘the Yi King is regarded by the Chinese with peculiar veneration,...as being the most ancient of their classical writings. The Shi is the oldest of the Chinese classics, and contains documents more than a thousand years earlier than king Wan. Several pieces of the Shih King are also older than anything in the Yi; to which there can thus be assigned only the third place in point of age among the monuments of Chinese literature. Existing, however, about 3000 years ago, it cannot be called modern. Unless it be the books of the Pentateuch, Joshua, and Judges, an equal antiquity cannot be claimed for any portion of our Sacred Scriptures.
It will be well to observe here also how much older the The Text Text is than the Appendixes. Supposing much oer them to be the work of Confucius, though Appendixes. it will appear by and by that this assumption 1 It has been suggested that ‘ Antiquissimus Sinarum liber’ may mean only ‘ A very ancient book of the Chinese,’ but the first sentence of the Preface to the work commences:—‘ Inter omnes constat librorum Sinicorum, quos classicos vocant, primum et antiquissimum esse Y-King.’
At the end of M. De Guignes’ edition of P. Gaubil’s translation of the Sha, there is a notice of the Yi King sent in 1738 to the Cardinals of the Congregation de Propaganda Fide by M. Claude Visdelou, Bishop of Claudiopolis. M. De Guignes says himself, ‘ L’ Y-King est le premier des Livres Canoniques des Chinois.’ But P. Visdelou writes more guardedly and correctly:—‘ Pour son ancienneté, s'il en faut croire les Annales des Chinois, il a été commencé quarante-six siécles avant celui-ci. Si cela est vrai, comme toute la nation ]’avoue unanimement, ou peut a juste titre l’appeler le plus ancien des livres.’ But he adds, ‘Ce n’étoit pas proprement un livre, ni quelque chose d’approchant; c’étoit une énigme trés obscure, et plus difficile cent fois 4 expliquer que celle du sphinx.’
P. Couplet expresses himself much to the same effect in the prolegomena (p. xvili) to the work called ‘Confucius Sinarum Philosophus,’ published at Paris in 1687 by himself and three other fathers of the Society of Jesus (Intor- cetta, Herdritch, and Rougemont). Both they and P. Visdelou give an example of a portion of the text and its interpretation, having singularly selected the same hexagram—the 15th, on Humility.
8 THE Yi KING. CH. I. ee can be received as only partially correct, if indeed it be received at all, the sage could not have entered on their composition earlier than B.C. 483, 660 years later than the portion of the text that came from king Wan, and nearly 630 later than what we owe to the duke of Aau. But during that long period of between six and seven centuries changes may have arisen in the views taken by thinking men of the method and manner of the Yi; and I cannot accept the Text and the Appendixes as forming one work in any Proper sense of the term. Nothing has prevented the full understanding of both, so far as parts of the latter can be understood, so much as the blending of them together, which originated with Pi Kih of the first Han dynasty. The common editions of the book have five of the Appendixes (as they are ordinarily reckoned) broken up and printed side by side with the Text; and the confusion thence arising has made it difficult, through the intermixture of incongruous ideas, for foreign students to lay hold of the meaning. 6. Native scholars have of course been wel] aware of the difference in time between the appearance of the Text and Laboursof the Appendixes; and in the Khang-hsi edition Ficin of them the two are printed separately. the Yi. Only now and then, however, has any critic ventured to doubt that the two parts formed one homo- geneous whole, or that all the appendixes were from the style or pencil of Confucius. Hundreds of them have brought a wonderful and consistent meaning out of the Text; but to find in it or in the Appendixes what is un- reasonable, or any inconsistency between them, would be to impeach the infallibility of Confucius, and stamp on themselves the brand of heterodoxy. At the same time it is an unfair description of what Anta perieee they have accomplished to say, as has description of been done lately, that since the fires of ea naROUS Shin, ‘the foremost scholars of each gene- ration have edited the Text (meaning both the Text and the Appendixes), and heaped commentary after commen- tary upon it; and one and all have arrived at the somewhat CH. II. INTRODUCTION. 9 lame conclusion that its full significance is past finding out’, A multitude of the native commentaries are of the highest value, and have left little to be done for the elucidation of the Text; and if they say that a passage in an Appendix is ‘unfathomable’ or ‘ incalculable,’ it is because their authors shrink from allowing, even to themselves, that the ancient sages intermeddled, and intermeddled unwisely, with things too high for them. When the same writer who thus speaks of native scholars goes on to say that ‘in the same way a host Erroneous of European Chinese scholars have made account of the;. 2 labours of | translations of the Yi, and have, if possible, eee made confusion worse confounded,’ he only scholars. | shows how imperfectly he had made himself acquainted with the subject. ‘The host of European Chinese scholars who have made translations of the Yi’ amount to two,—the same two mentioned by me above on pp. 6,7. The translation of Regis and his coadjutors * is indeed capable of improvement; but their work as a whole, and especially the prolegomena, dissertations, and notes, supply a mass of correct and valuable information. They had nearly succeeded in unravelling the confusion, and solving the enigma of the Yi.
CHAPTER II.
THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF THE TEXT. THE LINEAL FIGURES AND THE EXPLANATION OF THEM.
1. Having described the Yi King as consisting of a text in explanation of certain lineal figures, and of appendixes to it, and having traced the composition of the former to 1 See a communication on certain new views about the Yi in the ‘ Times’ of April 20, 1880; reprinted in Triibner’s American, European, and Oriental Literary Record, New Series, vol. i, pp. 125-127.
? Regis’ coadjutors in the work were the Fathers Joseph de Mailla, who turned the Chinese into Latin word for word, and compared the result with the Man&au version of the Yi; and Peter du Tartre, whose principal business was to supply the historical illustrations. Regis himself revised all their work and enlarged it, adding his own dissertations and notes. See Prospectus Operis, immediately after M. Mohl’s Preface.
10 THE Yi KING. CH. II. its authors in the twelfth century B.C., and that of the latter to between six and seven centuries later at least, I proceed to give an account of what we find in the Text, and how it is deduced from the figures. The subject-matter of the Text may be briefly repre- The Vicon. Scuted as consisting of sixty-four short essays, sists of essays enigmiatically and symbolically expressed, on ea ce important themes, mostly of a moral, social, and political character, and based on the same number of lineal figures, each made up of six lines, some of which are whole and the others divided. The first two and the last two may serve for the present = aa eee III] ==. The Text says nothing about their origin and —— eee as a specimen of those figures: formation. There they are. King Wan takes them up, one after another, in the order that suits himself, deter- mined, evidently, by the contrast in the lines of each successive pair of hexagrams, and gives their significance, asa whole, with some indication, perhaps, of the action to be taken in the circumstances which he supposes them to symbolise, and whether that action will be lucky or unlucky. Then the duke of au, beginning with the first or bottom line, expresses, by means of a symbolical or emblematical illustration, the significance of each line, with a similar indication of the good or bad fortune of action taken in connexion with it. The king’s interpretation of the whole hexagram will be found to be in harmony with the combined significance of the six lines as interpreted by his son, Both of them, no doubt, were familiar with the practice of divination which had prevailed in China for more than a thousand years, and would copy closely its methods and Style. They were not divining themselves, but their words became oracles to subsequent ages, when men divined by the hexagrams, and sought by means of what was said under them to ascertain how it would be with them in the ? See Plate I at the end of the Introduction.
Cie sii; INTRODUCTION. Tr future, and learn whether they should persevere in or with- draw from the courses they were intending to pursue.
2. I will give an instance of the lessons which the lineal figures are made to teach, but before I do so, it will be The origin of BeCessary to relate what is said of their origin, the lineal and of the rules observed in studying and Cena interpreting them. For information on these points we must have recourse to the Appendixes; and in reply to the question by whom and in what way the figures were formed, the third, of which we made use in the last chapter, supplies us with three different answers.
(i) The 11th paragraph of Section ii says:— ‘Anciently, when the rule of all under heaven was in the hands of P4o-hsi, looking up, he contemplated the brilliant forms exhibited in the sky; and looking down, he surveyed the patterns shown on the earth. He marked the ornamental appearances on birds and beasts, and the (different) suitabilities of the soil. Near at hand, in his own person, he found things for consideration, and the same at a distance, in things in general. On this he devised the eight lineal figures of three lines each, to exhibit fully the spirit-like and intelligent operations (in nature), and to classify the qualities of the myriads of things.’
PAo-hsi is another name for Fi-hsi, the most ancient personage who is mentioned with any definiteness in Chinese history, while much that is fabulous is current about him. His place in chronology begins in B.C. 3322, 5203 years ago. He appears in this paragraph as the deviser of the eight kwa or trigrams. The processes by which he was led to form them, and the purposes which he intended them to serve, are described, but in vague and general terms that do not satisfy our curiosity. The eight figures, however, were |, OO —=>, =|, and = =;s called khien, tui, li, fan, sun, khAn, kan, and khw4n; and representing heaven or the sky; water, especially a collection of water as in a marsh or lake; fire, the sun, lightning; thunder; wind and wood; water, especially as in rain, the clouds, springs, streams in defiles, and the moon; a hill or mountain; and the earth. To each of these figures is assigned a certain attribute or quality which should be suggested by the > et oe J 7 12 THE YI KING, CH. II. en ee natural object it symbolises; but on those attributes we need not enter at present.
(ii) The 7cth and 71st paragraphs of Section i give another account of the origin of the trigrams:— ‘In (the system of) the Yi there is the Great Extreme, which produced the two [| (Elementary Forms). These two Forms pro- duced the four Hsiang (Emblematic Symbols); which again produced the eight Kwa (or Trigrams). The eight Kwa served to determine the good and evil (issues of events), and from this determination there ensued the (prosecution of the) great business of life.’
The two elementary Forms, the four emblematic Symbols, and the eight Trigrams can all be exhibited with what may be deemed certainty. A whole line ( ) and a divided (— —) were the two f. These two lines placed over themselves, and each of them over the other, formed the four Hsiang: —<—<-j} << —— The same two lines placed successively over these Hsiang, formed the eight K wA, exhibited above.
Who will undertake to say what is meant by ‘the Great Extreme’ which produced the two elementary Forms? Nowhere else does the name occur in the old Confucian literature. I have no doubt myself that it found its way into this Appendix in the fifth (?or fourth) century B.c. from a Taoist source. AG Hsi, in his ‘ Lessons on the Yi for the Young,’ gives for it the figure of a circle —thus,Q; observing that he does so from the philosopher Xu (A.D. 101 7-1073)', and cautioning his readers against thinking that such a representation came from Fa-hsi himself. To me the cir- cular symbol appears very unsuccessful. ‘The Great Ex- treme,’ it is said, ‘divided and produced two lines,—a whole line and a divided line.’ But I do not understand how this could be. Suppose it possible for the circle to unroll itself; * Kau-jze, called A’iu Tun-t and Aau Mau-shuh, and, still more commonly, froin the rivulet near which was his favourite residence, A’au Lien-£/i. Mayers (Chinese Reader's Manual, p. 23) says:—‘ He held various offices of state, and was for many years at the head of a galaxy of scholars who sought for instruc- tion in matters of philosophy and research:—second only to Ad Hsf in literary repute,’ CH.-1L INTRODUCTION. Iss —we shall have one Jong line, —_____._ If this divide itself, we have two whole lines; and another division of one of them is necessary to give us the whole and the divided lines of the lineal figures. The attempt to fashion the Great Extreme as a circle must be pronounced a failure.
But when we start from the two lines as bases, the formation of all the diagrams by a repetition of the process indicated above is easy. The addition to each of the trigrams of each of the two fundamental lines produces 16 figures of four lines; dealt with in the same way, these produce 32 figures of five lines; and a similar operation with these produces the 64 hexagrams, each of which forms the subject of an essay in the text of the Yi. The lines increase in an arithmetical progression whose common difference is 1, and the figures in a geometrical progression whose common ratio is 2. This is all the mystery in the formation of the lineal figures; this, I believe, was the process by which they were first formed; and it is hardly necessary to imagine them to have come from a sage like Fa-hsi. The endowments of an ordinary man were sufficient for such a work. It was possible even to shorten the operation by proceeding at once from the trigrams to the hexagrams, according to what we find in Section i, paragraph 2:— ‘A strong and a weak line were manipulated together (till there were the 8 trigrams), and those 8 trigrams were added each to itself and to all the others (till the 64 hexagrams were formed).’
It is a moot question who first multiplied the figures Who first from the trigrams universally ascribed to eethoiees Fd-hsi to the 64 hexagrams of the Yi. The to 64 more common view is that it was king Wan; but A Hsi, when he was questioned on the subject, rather inclined to hold that Fa-hsi had multiplied them himself, but declined to say whether he thought that their names were as old as the figures themselves, or only dated from the twelfth century B.c.! I will not venture to controvert 1 X(i-3ze XAwan shi, or Digest of Works of Al-3ze, chap. 26 (the first chapter on the Y?), art. 16.
14 THE Yi KING. CH. II. ere eee ke his opinion about the multiplication of the figures, but I must think that the names, as we have them now, were from king Wan.
No Chinese writer has tried to explain why the framers stopped with the 64 hexagrams, instead of going on to Why the 128 figures of 7 lines, 256 of 8, 512 of 9, and eee so on indefinitely. No reason can be given after 64. for it, but the cumbrousness of the result, and the impossibility of dealing, after the manner of king Wan, with such a mass of figures.
(iii) The 73rd paragraph of Section i, with but one para- graph between it and the two others which we have been considering, gives what may be considered a third account of the origin of the lineal figures:— ‘Heaven produced the sppirit-like things (the tortoise and the divining plant), and the sages took advantage of them. (The operations of) heaven and earth are marked by so many changes and transformations, and the Sages imitated them (by means of the Yf). Heaven hangs out its (brilliant) figures, from which are seen good fortune and bad, and the sages made their emblematic inter- pretations accordingly. The Ho gave forth the scheme or map, and the Lo gave forth the writing, of (both of) which the sages took advantage.’
The words with which we have at present to do are— “The Ho (that is, the Yellow River) gave forth the Map.’ This map, according to tradition and popular belief, con- tained a scheme which served as a model to Fi-hsi in making his 8 trigrams. Apart from this passage in the Yi King, we know that Confucius believed in such a map, or spoke at least as if he did4. In the ‘ Record of Rites’ it is said that ‘the map was borne by a horse?;’ and the thing, whatever it was, is mentioned in the Sha as still preserved at court, among other curiosities, in B.C. 10798, The story of it, as now current, is this, that ‘a dragon- horse’ issued from the Yellow River, bearing on its back an arrangement of marks, from which Fa-hs} got the idea of the trigrams.
a + Analects IX, viii. * Li A? VIII, iv, 16. * Sha V, xxii, 19.
All this is so evidently fabulous that it seems a waste of time to enter into any details about it. My reason for doing so is a wish to take advantage of the map in giving such a statement of the rules observed in interpreting the figures as is necessary in this Introduction.
The map that was preserved, it has been seen, in the eleventh century B.C., afterwards perished, and though there The form of was much speculation about its form from the the River Map. time that the restoration of the ancient classics was undertaken in the Han dynasty, the first delineation of it given to the public was in the reign of Hui 3ung of the Sung dynasty (A.D. 1101-1125)'. The most approved scheme of it is the following:— OOO0000 O @@eeodee@ It will be observed that the markings in this scheme are small circles, pretty nearly equally divided into dark and light. All of them whose numbers are odd are light circles, — I, 3, 5) 7,93 and all of them whose numbers are even are dark,—2, 4, 6, 8, 10. This is given as the origin of what is said in paragraphs 49 and 500f Section i about the numbers of heaven and earth. The difference in the colour of the circles occasioned the distinction of them and of what they 16 THE Yi KING. CH. II, re signify into Yin and Yang, the dark and the bright, the moon-like and the sun-like; for the sun is called the Great Brightness (Thai Yang), and the moon the Great Ob- scurity (Thai Yin). I shall have more to say in the next chapter on the application of these names. Fa-hsi in making the trigrams, and king Wan, if it was he who first mul- tiplied them to the 64 hexagrams, found it convenient to use. lines instead of the circles:—the whole line ( ) for the bright circle (©), and the divided line (— —) for the dark (@). The first, the third, and the fifth lines in a hexagram, if they are ‘correct’ as it is called, should all be whole, and the second, fourth, and sixth lines should all be divided. Yang lines are strong (or hard), and Yin lines are weak (or soft). The former indicate vigour and authority; the latter, feebleness and submis- sion. It is the part of the former to command; of the latter to obey.
The lines, moreover, in the two trigrams that make up the hexagrams, and characterise the subjects which they represent, are related to one another by their position, and have their significance modified accordingly. The first line and the fourth, the second and the fifth, the third and the sixth are all correlates; and to make the correlation perfect the two members of it should be lines of different qualities, one whole and the other divided. And, finally, the middle lines of the trigrams, the second and fifth, that is, of the hexagrams, have a peculiar value and force. If we have a whole line ( ) in the fifth place, and a divided line (— —) in the second, or vice versa, the correlation is com- plete. Let the subject of the fifth be the sovereign or a commander-in-chief, according to the name and meaning of the hexagram, then the subject of the second will be an able minister or a skilful officer, and the result of their mutual action will be most beneficial and successful. It is specially important to have a clear idea of the name of the hexa- gram, and of the subject or state which it is intended to denote. The significance of all the lines comes thus to be of various application, and will differ in different hexagrams.
CHitI. INTRODUCTION. iy, I have thus endeavoured to indicate how the lineal figures were formed, and the principal rules laid down for the in- terpretation of them. The details are wearying, but my position is like that of one who is called on to explain an important monument of architecture, very bizarre in its conception and execution. A plainer, simpler structure might have answered the purpose better, but the architect had his reasons for the plan and style which he adopted. If the result of his labours be worth expounding, we must not grudge the study necessary to detect his processes of thought, nor the effort and time required to bring the minds of others into sympathy with his.
My own opinion, as I have intimated, is, that the second account of the origin of the trigrams and hexagrams is the true one. However the idea of the whole and divided lines arose in the mind of the first framer, we must start from them; and then, manipulating them in the manner de- scribed, we arrive, very easily, at all the lineal figures, and might proceed to multiply them to billions. We cannot tell who devised the third account of their formation from the map or scheme on the dragon-horse of the Yellow River!'. Its object, no doubt, was to impart a supernatural character to the trigrams and produce a religious veneration for them. It may be doubted whether the scheme as it is now fashioned be the correct one,—such as it was in the Kau dynasty. The paragraph where it is mentioned, goes on to say—‘ The Lo produced the writing.’ This writing was a scheme of the same character as the Ho map, but on the back of a tortoise, which emerged from the river Lo, and showed it to the Great Yii, when he was engaged in his celebrated work of draining off the waters of the flood, as related in the Shi. To the hero sage it sug- gested ‘the Great Plan,’ an interesting but mystical document of the same classic, ‘a Treatise,’ according to Gaubil, ‘of Physics, Astrology, Divination, Morals, Politics, and Religion, the great model for the government of the ‘ Certainly it was not Confucius. See on the authorship of the Appen- dixes, and especially of Appendix III, in the next chapter.
18 THE Yi KING. CH. Il.
a kingdom. The accepted representation of this writing is the following:— But substituting numbers for the number of marks, we have This is nothing but the arithmetical puzzle, in which the numbers from 1 to g are arranged so as to make 15 in whatever way we add them!. If we had the original form of ‘the River Map,’ we should probably find it a numerical trifle, not more difficult, not more supernatural, than this magic square.
3. Let us return to the Yi of Kau, which, as I have said above on p. 10, contains, under each of the 64 hexagrams, a brief essay of a moral, social, or political character, sym- bolically expressed.
1 For this dissection, which may also be called reductio ad absurdum, of the Lo writing, I was indebted first to P. Regis. See his Y-King I, p. 60.
But A’ Hs? also has got it in the Appendix to his ‘Lessons on the Yi for the Young.’
CH. Il. INTRODUCTION. IQ To understand it, it will be necessary to keep in mind the circumstances in which king Wan addressed himself to the study of the lineal figures. The kingdom, under the sovereigns of the Yin or Shang dynasty, State of the ative!: ‘ country in Was utterly disorganised and demoralised.
PES OF nS A brother of the reigning king thus described its condition:— ‘The house of Yin can no longer exercise rule over the land. The great deeds of our founder were displayed in a former age, but through mad addiction to drink we have destroyed the effects of his virtue. The people, small and great, are given to highway robberies, villainies, and treachery. The nobles and officers imitate one another in violating the laws. There is no certainty that criminals will be apprehended. The lesser people rise up and commit violent outrages on one another. The dynasty of Yin is sinking in ruin; its condition is like that of one crossing a large stream, who can find neither ford nor bank ’.’
This miserable state of the nation was due very much to The character tH Character and tyranny of the monarch. of the, When the son of Wan took the field against mona him, he thus denounced him in ‘a Solemn Declaration’ addressed to all the states:— ‘Shau, the king of Shang, treats all virtue with contemptuous slight, and abandons himself to wild idleness and irreverence. He has cut himself off from Heaven, and brought enmity between him- self and the people. He cut through the leg-bones of those who were wading in a (winter-)morning; he cut out the heart of the xood man®*. His power has been shown in killing and murdering. His honours and confidence are given to the villainous and bad. He has driven from him his instructors and guardians. He has thrown to the winds the statutes and penal laws. He neglects the sacrifices to Heaven and Earth. He has discontinued the offerings 1 The Sha IV, xi, 1, 2.
* These were well-known instances of Shau’s wanton cruelty. Observing some people one winter’s day wading through a stream, he ordered their legs to be cut through at the shank-bone, that he might see the marrow which could so endure the cold. ‘The good man’ was a relative of his own, called Pi-kan. Having enraged Shau by the sternness of his rebukes, the tyrant ordered his heart to be cut out, that he might see the structure of a sage’s heart.
20 THE YI KING. CH. Il. ae ig ne eee in the ancestral temple. He makes (cruel) contrivances of won- derful device and extraordinary ingenuity to please his wife*.— God will no longer bear with him, but with a curse is sending down his ruin?’
Such was the condition of the nation, such the character of the sovereign. Meanwhile in the west of the kingdom, The lords of in a part of what is now the province of Sheneediaie hsi, lay the principality of Kau, the lords of king Wan. which had long been distinguished for their ability and virtue. Its present chief, now known to us as king Wan, was Khang, who had succeeded to his father in B.C. 1185. He was not only lord of Kau, but had come to be a sort of viceroy over a great part of the kingdom. Equally distinguished in peace and war, a model of all that was good and attractive, he conducted himself with re- markable wisdom and self-restraint. Princes and people would have rejoiced to follow him to attack the tyrant, but he shrank from exposing himself to the charge of being disloyal. At last the jealous suspicion of Shau was aroused. Wan, as has been already stated, was thrown into prison in B.C. 1143, and the order for his death might arrive at any moment. Then it was that he occupied himself with the lineal figures.
The use of those figures—of the trigrams at least—had long been practised for the purposes of divination. The employment of the divining stalks is indicated in ‘the Counsels of the Great Yii,’ one of the earliest Books of the Shi3, and a whole section in ‘the Great Plan,’ also a Book of the Sha, and referred to the times of the Hsia dynasty, describes how ‘doubts were to be examined’ by means of the tortoise-shell and the stalks*. Wan could not but be familiar with divination as an institution of his 1 We do not know what these contrivances were. But to please his wife, the infamous T4-4i, Shdu had made ‘the Heater’ and ‘the Roaster,’ two instruments of torture. The latter was a copper pillar laid above a pit of burning charcoal, and made slippery; culprits were forced to walk along it.
CH. Il. INTRODUCTION. ee country’. Possibly it occurred to him that nothing was King Wan More likely to lull the suspicions of his in prison. dangerous enemy than the study of the occupied with bon es ° the lineal figures; and if his keepers took notice of what figures. he was doing, they would smile at his lines, and the sentences which he appended to them.
I like to think of the lord of Kau, when incarcerated in Yd-li, with the 64 figures arranged before him. Each hexa- gram assumed a mystic meaning, and glowed with a deep significance. He made it tell him of the qualities of various objects of nature, or of the principles of human society, or of the condition, actual and possible, of the kingdom. He named the figures, each by a term descriptive of the idea with which he had connected it in his mind, and then he pro- ceeded to set that idea forth, now with a note of exhortation, now with a note of warning. It was an attempt to restrict the follies of divination within the bounds of reason. The last but one of the Appendixes bears the name of ‘Sequence of the Diagrams.’ I shall have to speak of it more at length in the next chapter. I only remark at present that it deals, feebly indeed, with the names of the hexagrams in harmony with what I have said about them, and tries to account for the order in which they follow one another. It does all this, not critically as if it needed to be established, but in the way of expository statement, relating that about which there was no doubt in the mind of the author.
But all the work of prince X/ang or king Wan in the Yi thus amounts to no more than 64 short paragraphs.
Work ofthe We do not know what led his son Tan to Bearers enter into his work and complete it as he lines, did. Tan was a patriot, a hero, a legislator, and a philosopher. Perhaps he took the lineal figures in hand as a tribute of filial duty. What had been done for the whole hexagram he would do for each line, and make it clear that all the six lines ‘bent one way their precious influence,’ and blended their rays in the globe of light which his father had made each figure give forth.
1 In the Book of Poetry we have Wan's grandfather (Than-fi, III, i, ode 3. 3) divining, and his son (king W4, III, i, ode 10, 7) doing the same.