What Is the I Ching? — As a Way of Reading Change

01

Before It Was a Philosophy

A modern reader approaching the I Ching often carries a presupposition: this is a “philosophical classic,” one of the Confucian Five Classics, containing profound insights about the cosmos, human life, and change.

This presupposition is not wrong — but it arrives too early.

The oldest stratum of the Zhouyi — the hexagram statements and line statements — is, in its core function, a divination manual.

It was not meant to be “read.” It was meant to be used: cast yarrow stalks or coins; obtain a hexagram; look up the corresponding hexagram or line statement; extract a clue about a specific question.

The content of these statements confirms this. They frequently use:

• ji (吉) — auspicious/favorable
• xiong (凶) — inauspicious/unfavorable
• wu jiu (无咎) — no fault/blame
• li she da chuan (利涉大川) — favorable to cross the great river

These are not descriptions of “general principles of change.” They are judgments and action recommendations addressed to specific situations and specific decisions.

What we now call “I Ching philosophy” — yin-yang, Qian-Kun, change and penetration, the numinous — comes mostly from the later appended “Ten Wings,” especially the Xici Zhuan (Commentary on the Appended Phrases). They are interpretations of the Zhouyi, not the Zhouyi itself.

This does not mean the interpretations are “wrong,” nor does it mean we should discard them. What we need is precision: the I Ching we read today is an accumulation of many different historical layers.

We cannot pour later philosophical answers back into the oldest divinatory practice of the Zhouyi.

02

What Does “Change” Actually Mean?

Now we turn to the Xici Zhuan.

One of the Xici’s central tasks is to explain what “Yi” — that is, “change” — actually means.

It does not stop at a slogan like “everything changes.” It breaks down the process of change. Several key terms appear here, and they do not all mean the same thing:

Hua (化)

The Xici says:

Hua refers to a continuous, gradually unfolding process of transformation. It does not happen overnight. It is slow, sustained, sometimes barely perceptible: a seed swelling in soil, temperature rising over months, a fracture in a relationship widening over a year.

Hua describes the phase of gradual accumulation — things are developing, but have not yet crossed a threshold.

Bian (变)

After hua has accumulated enough, something happens:

Qiong (穷) here does not mean “poverty.” It means “reaching the end” — accumulation has reached its limit, and the existing state can no longer sustain itself. Then bian occurs. Bian emphasizes the moment when a state shifts and the existing structure is redefined.

The Xici has another formulation:

He (阖) is closing; pi (辟) is opening. The switch between opening and closing — that is bian. It is the boundary between states.

Tong (通)

If bian proceeds in the right direction, it leads to:

Tong is the state of continuing flow and operation after change — a river finding a new channel, a body adapting to a new season, a life finding a new rhythm.

Qiong → Bian → Tong → Qiong → Bian Again

The Xici contains a famous line:

Translated: reach the end, and change occurs; after change, there is penetration; after penetration, there is endurance.

But “endurance” here is easy to misread. Many interpret this as: “after going through change, you finally stabilize.”

If we follow the Xici’s own logic of “qiong — bian — tong — jiu,” endurance does not look like an unchanging stability. It looks more like the capacity to continue operating — and continuing to operate inherently includes the possibility of the next change.

True “endurance” is not being fixed in one state forever.

True endurance is the repeated capacity to transform again when you reach the end.

“Endurance” is a capacity to remain changeable, not a static state of safety.

Now let us return to the phrase “Everything changes.”

It is not wrong. But it is too shallow.

What the Xici offers is not a slogan, but a set of tools:

• Are you in the phase of hua (accumulating)?
• Or have you reached the edge of qiong (about to shift)?
• Have you just gone through bian and are now in tong (need to go with the flow)?
• Or have you been in tong for a while and need to start watching for the next qiong?

Each state corresponds to different questions and different responses.

This is what “change” looks like when it is not an empty phrase.

03

A Hexagram Gives Change a Form

What role do the sixty-four hexagrams play in this view of change?

A common modern explanation is: “The sixty-four hexagrams are sixty-four models of change designed by the ancients.”

This sounds reasonable. But historically, we need to be cautious:

• The origin of the sixty-four hexagrams is itself debated among scholars — some excavated materials even suggest that numerical hexagrams may predate yin-yang line notation;
• The Mawangdui silk manuscript Zhouyi has a different hexagram sequence from the received text;
• The tradition itself records four different attributions for who “invented” the eight trigrams or sixty-four hexagrams.

So: we cannot say “the ancients designed sixty-four categories of change” — that goes beyond what we can verify.

For early users, hexagrams certainly could lead to auspicious/inauspicious judgments. The hexagram and line statements themselves were answering questions like “Is this favorable?” “Should I act?”

But from the increasingly mature interpretive tradition that followed the Yi Zhuan (Commentaries), the hexagram also took on another function: it placed change within a structure of positions, relationships, and wholes.

Without the hexagram, “change” is an abstract word — everyone agrees it exists, but no one can say what specific shape it takes at this moment.

With the hexagram, you get a structure: the relationship between upper and lower trigrams; the position of each of the six lines; the significance of each position within the whole structure; whether any lines are “moving” (old yin/yang).

A hexagram does not merely deliver a judgment. It simultaneously organizes a situation into an observable structure.

For us today, this structural aspect may be the most valuable part to relearn.

We can read the sixty-four hexagrams as sixty-four different observational structures.

Not “sixty-four answers” — but “sixty-four ways of structuring observation.”

04

Casting Is Part of the Structure

This naturally leads to the next question: if the hexagram is just an observational framework, why does “casting” matter? Why not simply choose a hexagram to read?

Here we need to pause and return to the Xici’s own description of “how a hexagram is generated.”

It describes a specific procedure — the da yan (great expansion) yarrow-stalk method: fifty stalks, forty-nine used; divide into two — imaging the Two (Heaven and Earth); set one aside — imaging the Three (Heaven, Earth, Humanity); count off by fours — imaging the Four Seasons; tuck aside the remainder — imaging the intercalary (leap) month; repeat through eighteen changes to form one hexagram.

This is not incidental rhetoric.

The Xici is saying: the process of generating a hexagram is itself organized as an “imaging” (象) of the orders of Heaven and Earth, the Three Powers, the Four Seasons, and the calendar.

It is not modern “simulation” in the computational sense. It is a way of embedding human divination practice into cosmic order through number and ritual operation.

The Xici concludes with:

The phrase “行鬼神” is difficult to render in modern language without importing unexamined presuppositions. It might mean “causing the operation of guishen,” or it might be closer to “activating the transformative process to which guishen refers.” What matters here is that the Xici does not understand divination as mere calculation.

This sentence may feel uncomfortable to a modern reader.

But if our aim is to understand the classical text as much as possible on its own terms and through its historical layers, we cannot skip it.

The Xici genuinely believed that the casting process was not just counting, but connected to a larger order — an order named in its own language as shen (神) or guishen (鬼神).

We do not need to agree with this explanation.

We only need to accurately state: this is how the Xici itself understood divination.

05

From a Cast Result to a Reading

We now have a hexagram. But casting rarely stops there.

Most people who have ever picked up a casting guide have encountered something like this: cast six lines; some come up as “old” yin or yang, meaning they are about to flip into their opposite — these are the “moving lines” (动爻, dong yao); read the moving line’s statement, then flip it and read the resulting “changed hexagram” (之卦, zhi gua) as well.

This feels like one coherent, ancient procedure — 本卦 (original hexagram) → 动爻 (moving line) → 之卦 (resulting hexagram) — and it is usually treated that way.

But here the layers pull apart again.

The raw material is genuinely old. The da yan procedure in Section 04 produces four possible counts, traditionally distinguished as old yang, young yin, young yang, and old yin. The idea that some lines carry more instability than others — that a cast line can be “about to change” rather than simply fixed — is built into the yarrow-stalk method itself, in the oldest layer we can access.

What is not built into that oldest layer is a complete, fixed rule for what to do once a cast produces more than one “old,” changing line at a time.

The closest thing to a complete rulebook — the standard “if one line is changing, read this text; if two lines are changing, read that one instead” system most people learn today — is generally credited to Zhu Xi’s (朱熹) Yixue Qimeng (易学启蒙), a twelfth-century CE text. That is roughly two thousand years after the Zhouyi’s core text, and centuries after the Xici.

Earlier practice looks less tidy. The Zuozhuan — a historical narrative compiled later, but recording divination cases from the much earlier Spring-and-Autumn period — includes readings that treat all six lines of a hexagram as changing at once, a situation the now-standard system handles only as a special exception. This does not mean those earlier diviners were doing something wrong. It means the fixed procedure now presented as “the traditional method” is itself the end product of a long standardization — one substantially completed only in the Song dynasty, well over a thousand years after the practice it claims to systematize.

So: the observation that a cast result can single out a position “beginning to move” is old. The complete, step-by-step system for reading that movement — the one most casting guides now present as if it had always existed — is a later achievement, layered on top of the oldest practice rather than already contained within it.

06

And Then the Text Says: Shen

When you follow the thread of “change” all the way through — from the dividing, setting aside, counting, and tucking of the yarrow stalks to the generation of a hexagram; from the structure of the hexagram to the positions and movements of its lines; from the accumulation of hua to the transition of bian to the extension of tong — when you have gone deep enough, a word appears in the Xici:

Shen (神).

It appears in several key passages:

That which is unpredictable and ungraspable in the operation of yin and yang — that is called shen. This is not defining an entity called shen. It describes a quality — the side of yin-yang change that cannot be fully calculated or foreseen.

They cannot be described in terms of a fixed location and a fixed shape, the way ordinary things can.

This passage ties shen’s operation directly to “change.” Shen’s “doing” is not a separate matter — it is the most subtle layer of the way of transformation itself.

From these passages, shen always appears where change is most difficult to fix, predict, and grasp.

In modern terms, we might say: the Xici appears to preserve, beyond the comprehensible structure of change, an “unfathomable” dimension, and calls it shen.

The Xici did not write a separate “Treatise on Shen.”

It encountered a limit that could not be further decomposed while talking about change.

It named what lies at that limit shen.

We do not need to decide here whether shen “is” an entity or not — because the text itself never settled that question definitively. We are tracing an ancient structure of thought to its own limit.

07

A World Before “Natural” and “Supernatural”

There is a deeper difficulty here, perhaps more difficult than “what is shen.”

We moderns are accustomed to dividing the world into compartments: natural (physical, causal, observable), supernatural (spirits, miracles, inexplicable), psychological (inner feeling, cognition), ethical (value, good and evil).

The world of the I Ching may not have been organized by this set of cuts at all.

The Tuan Zhuan on Hexagram 31 (Xian, 咸) says:

Notice the character 感 (gan — feeling/responding).

The same word moves from the interaction between qi and qi, to heaven-earth generating the ten thousand things, to a sage touching human hearts and bringing peace to the world.

The text does not pause, does not switch domains, does not mark “this is physics,” “this is cosmology,” “this is ethics.”

In its view, these are different expressions of the same thing.

This is why the “natural/supernatural” binary does not fit here.

If we translate “行鬼神” as “causing ghosts and gods to operate,” a modern reader immediately hears “supernatural forces intervening in the natural world” — whereas the original language may not have carried that rupture at all.

But we cannot go to the opposite extreme either: we cannot say that early China had no real belief in ghosts, spirits, ancestors, or ritual practice. That would be equally dishonest.

Ancestral sacrifice was real. Divination in political decision-making was real. “Respect the guishen but keep them at a distance” at least shows that guishen here is not a term that can be casually reduced to a psychological metaphor; it is an object that requires proper ritual treatment.

So a more accurate description might be:

The early Chinese intellectual world was not organized around a “natural/supernatural” axis. It used other distinctions (幽/明 — visible/invisible, 人事/天道 — human affairs/cosmic pattern, ritual/proper conduct). But within this framework, ghosts, spirits, ancestors, and divination were real and agentive — not later philosophical abstractions labeled “natural laws.”

We cannot impose modern categories on the ancients.

But we also cannot delete what they genuinely believed, just to make them more “acceptable” to us.

08

What We Do Not Know

Every previous article in Baziritual’s Foundation has been doing one thing: explaining.

Explaining that the Five Phases are not substances. Explaining that the Day Master is not the self. Explaining that the Stems and Branches are not personality labels. Explaining that the I Ching’s “change” is not an empty slogan.

Explaining — translating a set of unfamiliar, ancient, easily misunderstood terms into a framework that a modern reader can enter.

This is Baziritual’s method.

But at the last article of the Foundation, we have reached a boundary.

The boundary is this: the Xici believed that divination participates in cosmic structure and touches the operation of shen — and Baziritual does not intend to render a verdict on whether this is “really” the case.

This is not evasion.

It is a deliberate epistemic stance: we can study what the text says. We can trace how its readers understood it over time. We can understand the structure through which it observed change.

But there is a point beyond which explanation becomes substitution — where we stop understanding an old idea and begin replacing it with one of our own.

We are not the ancients.

We do not live in a world where ancestral sacrifice, yarrow-stalk divination, and reverence for ghosts and spirits were everyday realities.

We do not need to pretend to share the same certainty.

But we also do not need to rewrite their certainty as “actually, they were really doing psychology” — that is the same disrespect, simply dressed in rationalist clothing.

The ancient text did not doubt its own efficacy; a modern reader may not share that certainty. These two things must hold together. Otherwise, we either misdescribe the ancient text as sharing our doubt, or misdescribe ourselves as sharing their certainty.

What we can say is: we can understand their language and structure — but we do not need to claim we can fully translate their world.