I Ching (Yijing)

A divination manual of the Zhou period

Sutong Hao, reviewing Edward Shaughnessy's 2022 monograph in the journal Dao, reports that Shaughnessy accepts the view that the Zhouyi (Zhou Changes) was originally and primarily a manual for divination. On Hao's account, Shaughnessy holds that the text could not have been written much before about 800 BCE, that its final editing may have come a century or two later, and that the hexagram and line statements were more or less fixed by no later than 300 BCE. Hao places the book within a long-running scholarly dispute, so these dates are one position within it.

Traditional accounts give an earlier authorship. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry by Tze-Ki Hon reports that the trigrams and hexagrams are traditionally attributed to the mythical figure Fu Xi, and that the hexagram and line statements are said to come from King Wen and the Duke of Zhou in the eleventh century BCE. The entry presents these as attributions, and they do not agree with the later dating above.

Line statements and Zhou divination records

Shaughnessy's 1995 article in Early China examined Zhou dynasty divination records. He argued that diviners produced omen-texts of three four-character lines, the first describing shell cracks and the rest a rhymed couplet linking the omen to the topic of the divination. He proposed that this structure parallels the most developed form of the Yijing line statements, which would indicate the functional context in which those statements arose.

Commentaries and canonisation

The philosophical commentaries known as the Ten Wings (shiyi, also called the Yizhuan) were composed between the fifth and second centuries BCE according to the Stanford entry, and the publisher's description of Richard Smith's 2012 book dates the text's recognition as a Confucian classic to 136 BCE. Hao reports Shaughnessy's view that four of the commentaries were written not much later than the fifth century BCE and that they turned the divination text into the classic Yijing by treating it as a microcosm of the world.

The same Stanford entry dates later commentators: Jing Fang (77 to 37 BCE), Yu Fan (164 to 233), Wang Bi (226 to 249), Kong Yingda (574 to 648), who edited the state-approved Zhouyi zhengyi, and Zhu Xi (1130 to 1200), who emphasised the philosophical value of divination.

Excavated manuscripts

Columbia University Press describes three manuscript finds. The Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi dates to about 300 BCE, two manuscripts from a third-century BCE tomb at Wangjiatai relate to the Guicang, an alternative divination tradition using hexagrams, and the Fuyang Zhou Yi comes from the tomb of Xia Hou Zao, who died in 165 BCE, and gives a prognostication for each line. Hao reports that the early manuscripts are largely similar to the received text but show variant characters and different hexagram sequences, which Shaughnessy reads as evidence of different teaching traditions.

Names of the text

Sources use several names for related material. Zhouyi (Zhou Changes) refers to the core text of hexagram and line statements, Yizhuan (Commentaries on the Changes) to the Ten Wings, and Yijing (Classic of Changes) to the combined classic that Hao says Shaughnessy sees the commentaries as having produced. Smith's book uses the spelling I Ching, the Stanford entry uses Yijing, and Columbia's title for the manuscripts volume gives Yi Jing (I Ching). The spellings refer to the same text.

The choice of name carries an argument. Hao notes that the older paradigm of Zhouyi study read the text in light of the Yizhuan and assumed it was primarily a philosophical work, whereas the later approach Shaughnessy follows begins from divination and so favours the name Zhouyi for the Zhou-period text.

Lines, trigrams and hexagrams

The Stanford entry describes yin as represented by a broken line and yang by an unbroken line. A trigram has three lines and a hexagram has six, so that the 64 hexagrams are formed by combining trigrams. A hexagram can be read as an upper and a lower trigram, or as three pairs of lines standing for heaven, humankind and earth, and each line position carries its own significance in interpretation.

Terms of divination and of mind

In Shaughnessy's account, as Hao summarises it, a divination record has a command (mingci) that states the topic, a prognostication (zhanci) and an oracle (yaoci). Lu and Wei gloss the term shen with several senses, including deities, the spiritual and the wondrous, which shows that one word can carry several meanings and that a translation fixing one of them may mislead a reader.

The yarrow stalk procedure

The Stanford entry describes the principal classical method as using 50 yarrow stalks, called the number of Great Expansion, of which one is set aside and 49 used. The stalks are divided into two piles and removed in groups of four, the remainders determine a line value of 9, 8, 7 or 6, the sequence is repeated three times to obtain one line, and six repetitions give a complete hexagram.

Bréard's historical study notes that many shortcuts and variants of Yijing divination existed and that they tend towards schemes with equiprobable or symmetric results. The sources reviewed do not set out other methods step by step, so this page does not describe them.

The question and the two-step reading

Hao reports Shaughnessy's view that, in Zhou-period practice, the topic is put to the divination medium and through it to the spirit world, as a command that he reads as a form of prayer asking that the desired outcome be blessed. He proposes that Zhouyi divination had two steps: a hexagram is first produced, and then one of its six lines is determined, whose statement serves as the oracle. This is a scholarly reconstruction of an early practice and not a description of every later method.

Modern consultation

The sources reviewed do not describe a standard modern consultation or session. Zeng's article on Jungian practice says that some Jungian analysts practise I Ching divination to gain insight into the physical and psychological state of therapeutic relationships and for personal development. Li's ethnography of fortune-telling in China concerns bazi, a system based on birth date and time, and describes diviners using verbal skills in dialogue with clients. It does not describe Yijing consultations and should not be read as doing so.

Divination and decision-making

In the Zhou-period reconstruction, the use was divinatory. Hao reports that the command put a topic to the divination medium and that milfoil divination often came with an interpretive apparatus to explain the result. Shaughnessy's 1995 study of omen-texts likewise describes statements that link an omen to the topic of the divination. These sources describe how the method was used in early China, not whether it predicts events.

Moral cultivation

Lu and Wei argue that divination in the Yijing is bound by three moral constraints, reverence, sincerity and upright steadfastness, and that constant virtue makes formal divination unnecessary. They present the aim of studying the text as becoming a person who no longer needs to consult it. This is one scholarly interpretation of a contested remark attributed to Confucius, and the Stanford entry separately reports that Zhu Xi emphasised the philosophical value of divination.

Self-knowledge and psychological use

Zeng reports that Carl Jung discovered the I Ching in 1919 and sorts his uses of it into three kinds: to preview future potentials of outer reality, to reveal a psychological state, and to engage with spiritual agencies. Sgorbati writes that Jung viewed the text as a tool for reaching the unconscious and for treating neurosis. These are claims made within the Jungian tradition and have not been shown by the sources reviewed to produce measurable outcomes.

Scholarship on the text

Most research on the I Ching is historical, philological and archaeological. Hao reports that Shaughnessy combines archaeology, paleography and historiography to reconstruct how the Zhouyi was formed, and the excavated manuscripts described by Columbia University Press are the main new evidence. This work addresses the date, structure and meaning of the text. It does not address whether consulting it affects a person's health, behaviour or decisions.

Clinical and outcome research

PubMed searches run on 5 October 2026 combined I Ching, Yijing, Yi Jing and Book of Changes with divination or hexagram and with randomised, trial or systematic review. They returned two records, both unrelated to the practice. A broader search for I Ching or Yijing with divination returned 49 records. The first 20 were screened and included one article on Jungian practice and none that tested consultation as an intervention. No randomised trial, controlled study or systematic review of consulting the I Ching was found.

This is an absence of studies found and not evidence of no effect. Other databases were not searched, and only part of the broader result list was screened, so a study may exist that these searches missed.

Studies of chance and of use

Bréard's historical study examines the probabilities of outcomes in Yijing divination variants and finds a tendency towards equiprobable or symmetric schemes. It concerns how chance was understood and does not test whether readings predict anything. Sgorbati's historical evaluation and Li's ethnography are qualitative or historical work on how people use divination in therapeutic settings, and their abstracts report no outcome measures. Li also studied bazi and not the Yijing.

Contested readings

Lu and Wei describe interpretations of Confucius's remark to simply not divine as numerous and contested, among them a rejection of divination, its replacement by virtue and a statement of its ultimate purpose. They also report that Chinese scholarship has moved from seeing the Yijing as a book of divination to a book of virtue and righteousness and then a holistic system. Hao adds that Shaughnessy sees the text itself as unstable and open to several readings, with different teaching traditions visible in the variants.

Transmission beyond China

Princeton University Press describes Smith's book as tracing the text's adaptation in Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Tibet, its introduction to Europe by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century, and its adoption by the American counterculture in the 1960s. It names Leibniz and Jung among Western admirers. Sgorbati reports that in China, Jung's ideas have been reworked as a way of reviving older teachings about the heart (xin), through a call by Shen Heyong and his students for a sinicisation of Jungian psychology.

What the sources report on harms

None of the sources reviewed reports adverse events from consulting the I Ching, and none studied harms, so the sources do not show that harm does not occur. Li's ethnography of bazi fortune-telling in China states that the professional ethics of divination can influence the way practitioners guide customers, positively or negatively. That finding concerns a different divination system and should not be transferred automatically to the Yijing.

Care boundaries

No source reviewed presents consulting the I Ching as a diagnostic or medical procedure, and a reading cannot establish a diagnosis. A person with new, worsening or severe physical or mental health symptoms, or in crisis, needs assessment from an appropriate health professional or emergency service, and a reading should not delay or replace it. Zeng places Jungian use within a therapeutic relationship with an analyst, which is a different setting from a stand-alone consultation.

Training and regulation

The sources reviewed describe no training standard, professional register or legal regulation for I Ching practitioners in any jurisdiction, so none is stated here. Li's article mentions a divination manual that teaches communication skills to professional diviners in the bazi tradition. Requirements for any practitioner who also holds a health or counselling qualification, such as a Jungian analyst, were not examined.