Lianshan, Guicang and Zhouyi: the three Yi of ancient China

Ancient Chinese sources speak of three books of changes (三易): the Lianshan (連山), the Guicang (歸藏) and the Zhouyi (周易). All three were said to use the same eight trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams, but with different orders and texts. Only the Zhouyi, the book we now call the I Ching, survived as a complete classic; the other two were lost, though bamboo slips found at Wangjiatai in 1993 have given us a real glimpse of something very close to the Guicang.

Where the "three Yi" come from

The key passage is in the Rites of Zhou (周禮), in its description of the Grand Diviner's office. The Grand Diviner "is in charge of the methods of the three Yi: the first is called Lianshan, the second Guicang, the third Zhouyi" (掌三易之法，一曰連山，二曰歸藏，三曰周易), and it adds that in all three "the base trigrams are eight, and the derived figures sixty-four" (其經卦皆八，其別皆六十有四).

So the claim is not that there were three different systems of symbols. The hexagrams are shared. What differed was the arrangement and the words attached to them, much as three different books might comment on the same set of cards.

The Rites of Zhou itself is a late compilation, idealising the Zhou state, so this passage tells us what Han-era and late Warring States scholars believed, not necessarily what a Zhou official actually did. It is still our earliest framework for the three books.

The traditional account

From the Han dynasty on, commentators filled in the picture. The most widely repeated version, given by Zheng Xuan (鄭玄), runs like this:

• Lianshan, "Linked Mountains", was the Yi of the Xia dynasty. It began with the trigram Gen, the mountain, doubled: Hexagram 52, mountains upon mountains, hence the name.
• Guicang, "Return to Concealment" or "Returning and Storing", was the Yi of the Shang (Yin) dynasty. It began with Kun, earth, into which all things return and are stored: Hexagram 2.
• Zhouyi was the Yi of the Zhou dynasty, beginning with Qian, heaven: Hexagram 1.

Not everyone agreed. Another Han view, recorded from Du Zichun (杜子春), attributed the Lianshan to the mythical Fu Xi and the Guicang to the Yellow Emperor. Even the meaning of "Zhou" in Zhouyi was argued over: Zheng Xuan read it as 周普, "all-encompassing", while the Tang scholar Kong Yingda (孔穎達) insisted it simply named the Zhou dynasty. You will still see both explanations today; neither can be proved. (For the names themselves, see Yijing, Zhouyi, I Ching.)

What we can say is that the tradition consistently linked each book to a different starting hexagram, and that it imagined the three as successive dynastic versions of one divinatory art.

What happened to the Lianshan and the Guicang

By the Han dynasty, the Lianshan seems already to have been lost or nearly so, and nothing that is reliably the original survives. A text circulating under the name Guicang is listed in later bibliographies, but it too disappeared, leaving only scattered quotations in other books. Qing-dynasty collectors such as Ma Guohan (馬國翰) gathered these fragments. For a long time many scholars suspected that even the quoted Guicang was a later forgery.

The fragments are interesting because they do not read like the Zhouyi. Instead of terse line statements, they tell short stories of a past divination: "Long ago, so-and-so divined about such-and-such", followed by the result. One famous fragment connects the hexagram Gui Mei, the Marrying Maiden, with the tale of Heng E (姮娥, later Chang'e) stealing the elixir of immortality and fleeing to the moon.

The Wangjiatai bamboo slips

In 1993, archaeologists excavating a Qin-period tomb (no. 15) at Wangjiatai (王家臺), near Jiangling in Hubei, found a bundle of bamboo slips containing a divination text. Each entry gives a hexagram figure, a hexagram name, and then a story of the form "long ago, X divined about Y". Many of the names differ from the Zhouyi's, and the format matches the old Guicang quotations closely, including a passage about Heng E under Gui Mei.

Most specialists now accept that the Wangjiatai text is a version of the Guicang, or at least a book from the same tradition. That has two consequences:

• The later quotations of the Guicang were not simply invented; some genuinely ancient material lies behind them.
• In the late Warring States, divination manuals other than the Zhouyi were still in use, sharing the hexagrams but not the words.

Caution is still needed. The slips are a copy from around the third century BCE, damaged and incomplete, and nothing in them proves that the Guicang came from the Shang dynasty. The dynastic story remains tradition, not history. For the wider world of excavated manuscripts, see Mawangdui and the excavated I Ching.

Why only the Zhouyi survived

Several things set the Zhouyi apart:

• It gathered a body of commentary. The Ten Wings turned a diviner's manual into a book of philosophy, reading every hexagram as a lesson about timing and conduct. No comparable commentary is known for the other two.
• It became a classic. When the Han court established official scholars of the Five Classics in the second century BCE, the Changes meant the Zhouyi with its Wings. From then on it was taught, copied and examined; the others were not.
• Its text is open. The Zhouyi's images are compact and general — a well, a cauldron, a crane calling in the shade — and can be applied to many situations. Story-style entries, like those of the Guicang, tie each hexagram to one past case.

None of this means the Zhouyi was the "true" Yi and the others were mistakes. It means that one branch of a broad divinatory tradition was chosen, interpreted and preserved, and the history of the I Ching and its translations grew from that branch.

What this means when you read a cast

When you cast a hexagram today, you are using the Zhouyi's words, the King Wen order and the commentary tradition built on them. A few practical points follow:

• The figure is older than the words. The six lines were shared by all three books; the text you read is one tradition's interpretation of them. That is a good reason to look at the trigrams and the shape of the hexagram, not only the sentence.
• Different starting points, different emphases. A book that begins with the mountain, one that begins with earth and one that begins with heaven each imply a different centre of gravity. You can feel this when you read Hexagram 2, Kun beside Qian: the receptive is not a footnote to the creative.
• Read the Zhouyi on its own terms. Don't import Guicang-style stories into a Zhouyi reading or claim a "lost meaning" the sources do not support. The surviving text is rich enough to work with.