Zhu Xi and the Original Meaning of the Zhouyi

Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130–1200), the most influential Confucian thinker after Confucius and Mencius, wrote a short commentary called the Original Meaning of the Zhouyi (周易本義, Zhouyi benyi). Its central claim was simple and, in his day, provocative: the I Ching was originally a book for divination, and it should be read that way before it is read as philosophy. Together with his rules for interpreting changing lines, this view shaped almost every later manual, including the translations by Legge and Wilhelm that most English readers know.

Who Zhu Xi was

Zhu Xi lived under the Southern Song dynasty. He drew the Neo-Confucian teachings of the Cheng brothers, Zhou Dunyi and Zhang Zai into a single system, and his commentaries on the Four Books became the basis of the civil service examinations from the fourteenth century until 1905. His work on the Changes has two main parts:

• the Zhouyi benyi, a compact line-by-line commentary on the classic and the Ten Wings;
• the Introduction to the Study of the Changes (易學啟蒙), written with his student Cai Yuanding (蔡元定), which explains numbers, diagrams, the yarrow-stalk method and how to read a cast.

"The Changes was originally a book of divination"

The commentary most respected in Zhu Xi's time was that of Cheng Yi (程頤), which read every hexagram as a lesson in moral principle and statecraft, continuing the approach of Wang Bi and the meaning school. Zhu Xi admired Cheng Yi deeply. But he thought Cheng Yi had answered a different question from the one the book was written to answer. In his recorded conversations he says repeatedly that the Changes was originally a book of divination (易本卜筮之書), and that its words make sense only when you remember that someone was asking about a concrete matter.

He framed the history of the book in layers. Fu Xi drew the trigrams and hexagrams; King Wen and the Duke of Zhou attached the Judgments and line texts as divinatory statements; Confucius, in the Ten Wings, drew moral meaning from them. Each layer, he argued, should be read as what it is, not projected back onto the earlier ones.

The clearest example is the opening of Hexagram 1, Qian: 元亨利貞. The Wenyan commentary reads these as four virtues: origination, success, furtherance, perseverance. Zhu Xi instead explains the phrase as a divinatory verdict: great success, and it is fitting to be correct and firm. For him, the four-virtue reading is a fine Confucian development, but not the original sense. (See yuan heng li zhen for both readings.)

This was not a demotion of the book's wisdom. Zhu Xi's point was that the moral lessons come through the act of asking: a person faces a real decision, the oracle describes the situation, and the text tells them how a person of integrity should act in it.

The commentary itself

The Benyi is brief, often only a sentence or two per line. Zhu Xi usually explains the image first and then states "the omen" (占) — what someone who receives this line should expect or do. He was also willing to say he did not understand a passage, and in several places he marks a line as unclear rather than forcing a meaning onto it.

He also tried to restore the "old" layout of the book, keeping the two parts of the classic separate from the ten parts of the commentaries, instead of interleaving them hexagram by hexagram as Wang Bi's edition had done. Later printings, especially under the Ming, often rearranged his commentary to fit Cheng Yi's layout, which is why editions of the Benyi do not all look alike.

His rules for changing lines

The Zhou text gives no rule for what to read when several lines move. In the Introduction, Zhu Xi set out one, drawing partly on cases of divination recorded in the Zuozhuan and Guoyu. In outline:

• No moving lines: read the Judgment of the primary hexagram.
• One: read that line.
• Two: read both, with the upper one as the main text.
• Three: read the Judgments of both hexagrams, the primary as the "inner" side (貞) and the changed as the "outer" side (悔).
• Four: read the two still lines of the changed hexagram, the lower as the main text.
• Five: read the single still line of the changed hexagram.
• Six: read the Judgment of the changed hexagram, except in Qian and Kun, where the special texts 用九 and 用六 apply.

The full explanation, with a worked example, is in our guide to changing lines, and the six-line case has its own page.

Not everyone accepted these rules. Critics noted that the cases for four and five moving lines have little or no ancient precedent and look like Zhu Xi's own systematisation, and some readers prefer to read every moving line or only the lowest. The rules lasted because they are clear, consistent and cover every possible cast.

Why modern manuals follow him

When the Yuan dynasty restored the examinations, the official curriculum for the Changes named the commentaries of Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi. The Ming Great Compendium on the Zhouyi (周易大全) combined the two, and the Qing imperial Zhouyi zhezhong (周易折中), compiled under the Kangxi emperor, kept both at its centre. James Legge and Richard Wilhelm both worked from this tradition, and Wilhelm's widely used method for reading moving lines follows Zhu Xi in substance.

So when a modern book tells you to read the upper of two moving lines, or presents the yarrow-stalk procedure in the familiar way, it is usually passing on Zhu Xi, whether it names him or not. His diagrams of the Early Heaven arrangement, printed at the front of his works, did the same for the visual vocabulary of the Changes.

How to use Zhu Xi's approach in a reading

• Start with the question. Zhu Xi assumes that you are asking about something definite. Write your question down before you cast.
• Read the text as a verdict and as advice. Ask both "what does this say about the situation?" and "how should a person of integrity act in it?"
• Pick one rule and keep it. His line rules are a sound default. Their value is consistency; they stop you choosing whichever line you prefer.
• Don't force obscure lines. If a passage remains unclear, follow his example: say so, and lean on the Judgment and the overall image.
• Use the commentaries as layers. Read the Judgment first, then Cheng Yi or Wilhelm for moral depth. The two approaches complement rather than cancel each other; see image and number versus meaning and principle.