The appearance of the Yijing? It was the last of the Shang period when the power of Zhou was coming into its own. It was when the matter between Zhou and King Wen was in the offing. For this reason, its words are full of danger.”
Thus does the “Appended Sayings” Commentary describe the beginnings of the Yijing. Like much Yijing lore, the statement raises as many questions as it answers, but it is a good place to start thinking about the Change.
The last of the Shang Dynasty was in the 12th century B.C., some 6 centuries after its founding by Tang the Accomplished. It was the second dynasty in Chinese history, according to tradition. Tang brought down the House of Xia, descended from Yu the Great, tamer of the Yellow River. The Xia had fallen off from its glory years as generation after generation the ruling familybecame more effete. Finally, a debauched tyrant named Jie came to the throne and so outraged the land with his cruelty that Tang the Accomplished rose up to challenge him.
The Command of Heaven fell to Tang, and he became emperor in his own right.
History repeated itself in the Shang, and, indeed, every subsequent dynasty through the fall of the Manchu Qing Dynasty in 1911. Tang’s family had its moments of glory, but its energies waned, and another “bad last emperor” came to power. This was the Zhou mentioned in the opening quotation. King Wen started the rebellion that would lead to the establishment of the Zhou Dynasty, (coincidentally spelled the same in the English alphabet, but written with different Chinese characters).
Chinese records date the Xia Dynasty from the 22nd to the 18th centuries B.C, and give names and dates for 17 emperors. Nothing remains to substantiate particulars about the Xia, however. Twenty-eight Shang emperors are named in the traditional histories, but by the end of the 19th century A.D., the authenticity of that lineage was treated with skepticism.
At that time, only one kind of artifact existed from the Shang: bronze cooking implements cast so near perfection that they have rarely been equaled. When I was a graduate student at Princeton, my art class met in the university’s museum one day. The curator opened one of the cases, and each of us in turn put on white cotton gloves and held a ding, a bronze cauldron. As I recall, it was maybe eight inches tall, had 4 slender legs, and a pair of loops at the top. The metal had oxidized like an old penny behind a mossy turquoise patina. The “monster mask” design and filigree on its faces and cicada patterns on its legs looked more like delicate incising than casting.
Mostly I remember how nearly weightless it felt. For a thing of metal, it seemed to want to float. It was the equivalent in bronze of the eggshell porcelains made by other Chinese craftsmen 20 centuries later. The Shang cauldrons, along with tureens,wine beakers, grain containers and other implements were fit vessels for offering meals to airy spirits on mountain altars or to grace the tables of the nobility.
Their use is captured in the Yijing hexagram 50 CAULDRON, whose hexagram words read: “Primal Good-luck Gift.” The fourth line says the cauldron holds “the duke’s stew,.” And the third line suggests that “pheasant fat” might be one of the ingredients. Cauldrons probably sat on their legs, mentioned in the first and fourth lines, directly over a fire. Some being quite large, they required a “carrying-pole”, mentioned in the top two lines. The loops at the top are called “ears” in those lines, and the “carrying poles” passed through the ears to move the cauldron from the heat. The hexagram has been viewed as an abstract picture of a cauldron, and it appears to have legs at the bottom, and the top three lines might depict the “ears.”
Cauldrons continued to be used after the Shang. But when you pass from the display of Shang bronzes at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Freer Gallery in Washington, or New York’s Metropolitan to those of King Wen’s Zhou Dynasty, you’re impressed how this form was suddenly overtaken by gravity. They are ponderous in shape and flabby in the legs, and where the Shang artisan was able to turn the seams where molds had been joined into fanciful extensions of their designs, the Zhou left chunky handles.
Some of the bronzes had names of Shang people written in ancient characters on their undersides or interiors. But late Qing Dynasty scholars had voiced doubts whether the traditional accounts of pre-Zhou history had any basis in fact, let alone the roster of Shang emperors in the history books. The Yijing is the first of five “Classics” (ching or jing, in pinyin spelling) enshrined by the followers of Confucius as the fundamental works of Chinese culture. The second is the Shujing or Classic of Writings, a collection of speeches and other historical documents going back to the sage emperor Yao, who supposedly ruled for a hundred years in the 24th century B.C. Yao chose the second sage emperor, Shun, as the most able to succeed and Shun also picked a man of demonstrated merit to follow him.
This was Yu the Great, who earned his position by building the dikes that kept the Yellow River from spilling over into the countryside with ruinous floods. Yu, however, put his son on the throne and set in motion the dynastic round that led through Xia and Shang to King Wen and the Zhou Dynasty. However, those earlier Dynasties had been populated with a roster of emperors for whom there was no tangible proof. Until the second artifact of Shang culture came to light, that is.
At the beginning of the twentieth century A.D. antiquarians began digging through the fragrant wooden drawers of herbal medicine shops marked “dragon bones.” Powdered dragon bone is, in Chinese medicinal terms, “sweet, astringent, and somewhat cold.” It’s good for the small and large intestines, controlling sweating and overmuch dreaming, diarrhea, epilepsy, possession by demons and ghosts, and appears to aid in communication with spirits and lengthening life. Dragon bones were prescribed for Wang Yirong, a Qing official, in 1899, and he was intrigued that the ones he was given appeared to have writing on them. He showed them to scholars who realized that they were the relics of Shang Dynasty divination that employed turtle shells the shoulder blades of cattle.
Most dragon bones have turned out to be the fossilized remains of extinct elephant and rhinoceros species, but these shells and cattle bones had been added to the pharmacological classification when they were found by grave robbers and archeological site looters. They also provided a profitable sideline for skillful forgers, which complicated the next step of the investigation.
In the painstaking style of Qing scholarship, the scholars deciphered and catalogued the script, which was like that on Shang bronzes. They found that each one was dated with the pairs of characters in the 60 year cyclical counting system applied to both years and days. This method of recording time uses one set of ten characters called “heaven stems” and another of 12 “earth branches.” If the stems are 1,2,3,. . .10, and the branches are A.B,C,. . .L, the system matches 1and A, 2 and B, 3 and C all the way to 10 and J. Then it starts ove again with 1 and K, 2 and L, 3 and A, and goes round till it reaches 10 and L. Then it’s back to 1 and A and so forth.
We are all familiar with the earth branches from the zodiac on Chinese restaurant placemats. A is rat, the animal that will govern lunar year 2008; B is ox for 2009; C is tiger; D, rabbit; E, Dragon, F, snake; G, horse; H, goat (or sheep—Chinese doesn’t distinguish clearly); I, monkey; J, chicken; K, dog; and L is pig. So the stems and branches appear on the oldest Chinese written documents and are still in use today to mark time.
Some of these terms are used in the Yijing. The Hexagram Words of 18, DECAY, say “Before First (of the earth stems) Three Day After First Three Day.” Line 5 of Hexagram 57, ENTER has the same phrasing with the seventh of the stems. And the sixth appears in four places: the Hexagram Words of 49, LEATHER, and also its second line as well as the first lines of 26 GREAT TRAINING and 41 DECREASE. The characters for the sixth stem and the sixth branch differ by only a small length of one of their two brush strokes, and they were easily confused by scribes and the craftsmen carving wooden blocks for book printing.
Indeed, a third character is between the two in the length of that line and adds to the potential confusion. It might mean “the end.” Yijing scholars have from time to time seen all three possibilities in what I translate as “the sixth.” I choose “the sixth” because I think that the author intended to specify a six-day period, and, as the period ended on that day, the similarity among the three words ensured that his intent would come through however it was written.
The stem and branch dates were days on which questions were asked in divination by Shang Dynasty monarchs in particular, and they silenced the skeptics by providing verification for the traditional chronology back to Emperor Wu Ding who reined from1324 to 1265 B.C. Interestingly, Wu Ding is one of two Shang emperors mentioned in the Yijing’s Line Words. Hexagram 63, ALREADY GO-ASHORE, line three, refers to him by his posthumous title, saying “Gao Zong Conquer Ghost Region Three Year Win.:
The Ghost Region is believed to be an area west of the Shang domain inhabited by nomadic barbarians, and the line seems to refer to an historic campaign not otherwise recorded. It is known from oracle bone records that Wu Ding attacked the ancestors of King Wen in the vassal state of Zhou for some reason.
Other than these military exploits, the Classic of Writings remembers Wu Ding almost alone among middle Shang Emperors. There he’s seen presiding at a ritual sacrifice to Tang the Accomplished. The Han Grand Historian, Sima Qian, says that the next day, a pheasant perched on the “ear” of a cauldron used in the ceremony and squawked. Wu Ding was sorely frightened at what he saw as a bad omen. Earlier, I noted that line 3 of Hexagram 50, CAULDRON, refers to “pheasant fat” as a possible ingredient in the “duke’s stew.” Line 4 reads in full, “Cauldron Sever Leg Dump Duke Stew One’s Form Moisten Bad-luck.” This association with the ill-starred sacrifice in the Writings is very suggestive.
Wu Ding’s counselor agreed that the pheasant incident looked bad but said that it should be taken as a warning to improve the government that had become lax in recent years. Wu Ding took this advice to heart, and “the whole world rejoiced and the Shang way of government again prospered,” according to Sima Qian.
The other Shang ruler in the Change is Di Yi, who is named in Hexagram 11, POSITIVE, line 5, and 54, GO-HOME MAIDEN, line 5. Di Yi reined from 1191 to 1154 B.C. and was the father of the tyrannical last Shang Dynasty Emperor, Zhou. The first of those two lines seems to refer to his marriage and carries good luck as its oracle. Ironically, it was good luck for the emperor to sire an heir even though that heir was to bring the dynasty to ruin.
The line in GO-HOME MAIDEN also talks about marriage but goes on to say that “the sleeve of one’s ruler is not as excellent as the sleeve of one’s sister.” King Wen of Zhou married Di Yi’s sister, and it is possible this rather abstract image might refer to that Shang princess. A hoard of oracle bones discovered at Wen’s feif at Twin Peak Mountain recounts a sacrifice to Di Yi that King Wen performed; so at that point relations between lord and vassal were still good.
But Grand Historian Sima Qian asserts that the house of Shang had started to grow dissolute a couple of emperors before Di Yi and continued to worsen under him. Di Yi’s son and successor, Emperor Zhou, is described as having keen intelligence and strong enough to fight ferocious animals with his bare hands. But he was fond of wine, women, and licentious song and raised taxes exorbitantly to fill his courtyard with money and his granaries to overflowing with grain at the expense of the people. He collected rare animals and objects and threw orgiastic parties. At one, he made naked men and women chase each other round a pool filled with wine and through a forest of hanging meats, drinking far into the night. And he was given to cruel punishments—roasting people alive, cutting them into strips, chopping them to mincemeat.
When King Wen started his rebellion he scoffed at advisors who warned him of iminent danger. “Do I not have Heaven’s Command?” he asked. Then he had the advisor cut open to see if “the heart of a sage has seven apertures.” This act so cowed the court that Ji Zi, another virtuous official feigned insanity as a way of getting out of serving the emperor. Ji Zi is the one other historical figure mentioned in the Yijing, where he appears in the Line Words of hexagram 36, BRILLIANCE INJURED, line 5.
So at the “last of the Shang period when the power of Zhou was coming into its own and the matter between Zhou and King Wen was in the offing,” it was a time when the energies of one power were plunging toward a nadir and a new power was gathering force. A time of great change when the dynamics of change could be seen in sharp relief. A time when a rebel remembered as Wen, a name that means “culture,” could capture the meaning of change in his words—words full of danger—as well as in daring deeds and transform China’s culture.
