The Mawangdui silk I Ching and other excavated manuscripts

For two thousand years everyone read the I Ching in essentially one form: the text handed down by copyists and printers. Since the 1970s, archaeology has produced manuscripts that are far older than any printed edition, above all the Mawangdui silk Yijing, buried in 168 BCE, and the Shanghai Museum bamboo Zhouyi from the Warring States period. They confirm that the core text is ancient and remarkably stable, while showing that the order of the hexagrams, the spelling of their names and the commentaries around them were once far less fixed than later tradition assumed.

Mawangdui: a library in a tomb

In 1973 archaeologists opened Tomb 3 at Mawangdui (馬王堆), in Changsha, Hunan. It belonged to a son of the Marquis of Dai, and a wooden tablet dates the burial to 168 BCE. Among the silk manuscripts in a lacquer box were two versions of the Laozi and a complete text of the Changes, with several commentaries copied alongside.

The basic Zhouyi text is recognisably the same book. The sixty-four hexagrams are there, each with its Judgment and six line statements, and most sentences match the received version closely. But three things stand out.

A different order

The Mawangdui hexagrams are not in the familiar King Wen sequence. They are arranged systematically by trigram. The text is divided into eight groups of eight, each group sharing the same upper trigram, in the order Qian, Gen, Kan, Zhen, Kun, Dui, Li, Xun. Within each group, the doubled hexagram comes first and the lower trigrams follow a fixed order. So Hexagram 1, Qian still opens the book, but Kun, the receptive, does not come second: it opens the fifth group, as number 33.

This is a mechanical, almost tabular order, quite unlike the paired and thematic logic of the received sequence. Scholars disagree about whether it is older than the King Wen order or a later rearrangement made for convenience in divination. What it proves is that more than one order was in use in the early Han.

Different names and characters

Many hexagram names are written with different characters. Qian appears as 鍵, "a bolt or key", and Kun as 川, "river" (perhaps standing for a related word). Others vary too. Usually these are loan characters for the same spoken word, a normal feature of early manuscripts, but sometimes the variant suggests a slightly different reading, and translators have used them to rethink difficult lines.

Different commentaries

The silk carries a version of the Great Commentary (繫辭) that differs in places from the received text, together with several commentaries unknown before 1973. Scholars usually call them The Several Disciples Asked (二三子問), The Properties of the Changes (易之義), Essentials (要), Mu He (繆和) and Zhao Li (昭力). Several are dialogues between Confucius and his students about the hexagrams.

The most quoted passage, in Essentials, portrays Confucius in old age fond of the Changes, keeping it beside his mat at home and in his bag on journeys. Challenged by his disciple Zigong, he explains that he looks for its virtue and meaning rather than its use in divination, and says he and the diviners "travel the same road but arrive at different places" (同塗而殊歸). Whatever one makes of its historical accuracy, it shows that the link between Confucius and the Changes was being argued over already in the second century BCE. (For more, see Confucius and the I Ching.)

Edward Shaughnessy published an English translation of the Mawangdui text, I Ching: The Classic of Changes (1996), which follows the silk order.

The Shanghai Museum bamboo Zhouyi

In 1994 the Shanghai Museum acquired a large group of Warring States bamboo slips from the Hong Kong antiquities market. Because they were not excavated scientifically, their exact origin is unknown, but their script places them in the state of Chu, around 300 BCE. Among them, published in 2003, is the oldest known manuscript of the Zhouyi: fifty-eight slips covering parts of thirty-four hexagrams.

The text again agrees closely with the received Zhouyi, which pushes the stable core of the book back to at least the fourth century BCE. Its puzzling feature is a set of red and black symbols placed after the hexagram name and at the end of each section. They seem to mark some grouping of the hexagrams, but no explanation has won general agreement.

Other finds

• Fuyang (阜陽): Han-dynasty slips from a tomb closed around 165 BCE contain fragments of the Zhouyi with added divination formulas about specific matters, such as travel or marriage, attached to the hexagrams. They show the book in practical use as a divination manual.
• Wangjiatai (王家臺): Qin-period slips that appear to be a version of the Guicang, one of the "three Yi"; see Lianshan, Guicang and Zhouyi.
• Number-hexagrams (數字卦): groups of six numbers inscribed on Shang and Zhou bronzes, bones and pottery. Since the late 1970s, scholars have widely read them as records of divination results, showing that the six-line form, written in numbers before it was written in solid and broken lines, is very old.

What the manuscripts change, and what they don't

They change some things:

• The order is not sacred. The King Wen sequence is one traditional arrangement among others, not part of the original revelation.
• The Ten Wings grew over time. The Mawangdui commentaries show a wider and more fluid body of interpretation before the Ten Wings settled into their final form.
• Divination was always central. From the Fuyang formulas to the number-hexagrams, the evidence shows the book being used to ask real questions, not only studied as philosophy.

And they leave some things as they were:

• The core text is stable. Judgments and line statements in manuscripts more than two thousand years old agree with the received text far more than they disagree. There is no hidden "original I Ching" with a different message.
• The lines are read the same way. The six positions, the yin and yang lines and the Judgment-and-lines structure are already there.

Be wary of books or sites that claim the manuscripts reveal a secret meaning overturning the tradition. Real scholarship here is careful, often uncertain and mostly about individual characters and lines. The history of how the book was read and translated is covered in the I Ching's history and translations.

Reading a cast with the manuscripts in mind

• Trust the received text. When you cast a reading, the Judgment and lines you see are, in substance, what readers have used since at least the Warring States.
• Let the variants widen, not replace. When a line is obscure, a manuscript variant can suggest another angle. Use it as a second voice, not a correction.
• Don't over-read the order. Neighbouring hexagrams in the King Wen sequence are worth comparing as pairs, but the position of a hexagram in the book is not itself an omen.
• Remember the purpose. The oldest copies were working tools. Ask a clear question, read the changing lines carefully, and let the text speak to your situation.