The I Ching, or Yijing (Chinese: 易經, “Classic of Changes”), is one of the oldest of the Chinese classics. It began as a divination manual in the Western Zhou period, roughly the early first millennium BCE, so any single date for it is approximate. Its core is a system of sixty-four hexagrams — figures of six stacked broken or unbroken lines — each paired with short, often cryptic texts called the judgment and the line statements. A questioner casts yarrow stalks or coins to build a hexagram and then reads the matching text as guidance.
Over the Warring States and Han periods a set of commentaries known as the Ten Wings was added, and these reframed the divination manual as a book of cosmology and ethics. They link the changing lines to the interplay of yin and yang and to the cycles of nature, and they are the layer that later Confucian and Daoist thinkers drew on. Because of this dual history the I Ching is read in very different ways: as an oracle, as a philosophical account of change, and as a wisdom text. The translation represented and linked here is the Richard Wilhelm edition, rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes and published by Princeton University Press, the version through which most English readers have met the book.
Contents
Book I — Hexagrams 1–30 (the Upper Canon)
Book II — Hexagrams 31–64 (the Lower Canon)
The Ten Wings — appended commentaries (the judgments, the images, and the Great Treatise / Xici)
Reception
The I Ching is among the most influential books in Chinese history and one of the most widely read Chinese classics in the West. In China it became one of the Confucian Five Classics and shaped centuries of philosophy, medicine, and statecraft. In the twentieth century the Wilhelm–Baynes translation, carrying a foreword by Carl Jung, made it a touchstone of Western interest in Chinese thought and, later, of the 1960s counterculture. Scholars treat the early divinatory layer and the later philosophical commentaries as distinct, and they disagree over dating and authorship — the traditional attributions to figures such as Fu Xi, King Wen, and Confucius are legendary rather than documented — and over how much the received text reflects its earliest form. Its use as a method of divination is, by its nature, not something empirical study supports, and readers approach that aspect as tradition rather than as fact.
Frequently asked
What is the I Ching?
It is an ancient Chinese classic, also called the Book of Changes. At its core is a set of sixty-four hexagrams — figures of six broken or unbroken lines — each with a short text. It began as a manual for divination: a questioner casts yarrow stalks or coins, builds a hexagram, and reads the matching text as guidance. Later commentaries turned it into a book of philosophy as well.
Who wrote the I Ching?
There is no single author. The text grew in layers over many centuries, and the traditional attributions to legendary figures such as Fu Xi, King Wen, and Confucius are not documented history. Because authorship is composite and largely anonymous, the index records the author as “Various”.
How is the I Ching used?
Traditionally it is consulted as an oracle: a question is held in mind, a hexagram is generated by chance, and its judgment and changing lines are read for insight. It is also read non-divinatorily, as a philosophical account of change and of the interplay of yin and yang. Its predictive use is a matter of tradition rather than something empirical study supports.