King Wen of Zhou

The traditional story next turns from mythic antiquity to the final years of the Shang dynasty. Ji Chang, the ruler of the Zhou people and the man later remembered as King Wen, had become respected and increasingly powerful while still living under Shang rule. The last Shang king grew suspicious of him and had him imprisoned at Youli.

Tradition places an important part of the making of the Yi Jing during that imprisonment. Fu Xi had given the world the Ba Gua — the Eight Trigrams. King Wen is remembered as combining those elementary forms into the sixty-four gua, arranging them into the received sequence, and giving each gua its Judgment. With Wen, the simple patterns of yin and yang become the sixty-four situations that form the body of the book.

Wen lived during the long decline of Shang and the rise of Zhou. He built Zhou’s strength and prepared the transformation that was coming, but he died before Shang was finally defeated. His son King Wu completed the conquest and established the Zhou dynasty, honoring his father as King Wen and as the founder whose work had made the new order possible.

In the traditional story of the Changes, Fu Xi gives the Yi its fundamental images; King Wen gives those images their sixty-four forms, their order, and their Judgments. The book now begins to resemble the Yi Jing we can still open and consult today.