Confucius

By the time of Confucius, the Changes was already ancient. Confucius — Master Kong — lived during the later Zhou dynasty and became one of China’s most influential teachers and thinkers. He looked back to the traditions of the early Zhou for wisdom about learning, character, ritual, government, and how human beings should live together.

Tradition remembers Confucius as a devoted student of the Yi. One old story says that he read it so often that the leather straps holding his bamboo copy together broke again and again. A famous traditional reading of the Analects even has him wishing for more years to study the Changes so that he might avoid making great mistakes. The picture is of Confucius approaching the Yi as a student of an older wisdom, not as its inventor.

Tradition attributes to him the collection of commentaries known as the Ten Wings. These writings look back over the gua, their Judgments, their lines, their images, and their sequence and ask larger questions about what they reveal. They explore the patterns of Heaven and Earth, human conduct, the movement between situations, and the very nature of change. In the traditional story of the Yi Jing, Confucius does not give the book its oracle; he gives generations of readers a way to reflect upon it.

The Yi therefore should not be thought of simply as a Confucian book. Its foundations are older than Confucius and older than the philosophical traditions that later grew around it. Modern scholarship generally treats the Ten Wings as commentaries that accumulated over time rather than the work of a single hand, but the traditional attribution preserves Confucius’s place in the story: a learned reader standing before an already ancient work and finding in it enough depth to occupy a lifetime.