I Ching legend
The story of the I Ching begins with Fu Hsi, the first and greatest emperor of China, a founding hero of the culture. It was Fu Hsi who discovered the eight trigrams:
In antiquity Fu Hsi ruled the world we live in.
He looked up and saw the symbols hanging down from Heaven.
He looked down and saw the patterns on the Earth.
He saw markings on birds and animals
and the places where they lived on the Earth.
He drew on what was near within his body.
He drew on what was far.
He spontaneously brought forth the Eight Diagrams
to connect with the bright spirits
and to categorize the natures of the myriad things.
He was the first to use Change to help the people.
From the Ta Chuan, translated by Stephen Karcher.
This is one image of the beginnings. Another shows Fu Hsi walking beside the Yellow River, when a dragon horse rose from the waters with extraordinary markings. Naturally, he watched it closely: as a wise man, he understood that wisdom came from carefully observing nature. Fu Hsi observed these markings, and in time he transcribed them as the Before Heaven Sequence of the trigrams. Through studying this along with the natural world around him and within himself, Fu Hsi came to understand how the trigrams reflect basic truths about how energy moves. In so doing, he laid the foundations both for the traditional Chinese world view and for the I Ching.
Not until many centuries after the time of Fu Hsi were the trigrams grasped and understood by Wen Wang, wise king of the Chou. Wen was imprisoned by the corrupt Shang emperor. While he was held captive, he meditated on the trigrams, and brought them together to form the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. He gave each hexagram its name and wrote the Judgements that expound their fundamental meanings.
Eventually, King Wen's son Wu overthrew the cruel, extravagant Shang and established the new Chou dynasty. His grandson became ruler, and the boy's uncle, the Duke of Chou, was appointed as his regent. The Duke of Chou completed King Wen's work by writing short texts associated with each of the six lines of every hexagram.
Finally, Confucius himself (551-479BC) studied the I Ching exhaustively and wrote extensive commentaries on it, which are known as the I Ching's 'Wings'. These include the Advice (or Image), the Commentaries on the judgement and on the lines, as well as the Contrasts, Sequences, Attached Evidences and Appended Judgements, in addition to the Discussion of the Trigrams and the Great Treatise. With its origins in the greatest rulers and sages of China's past, and the illumination of Confucius' thought binding it into a whole, the I Ching was honoured as a Classic, and was required reading for anyone wishing to enter the higher orders of Chinese society.
So is this what really happened?
It seems - to the best of anyone's knowledge these days - that some of this is what really happened. The I Ching really did have its beginnings, as a written oracle, in the time of Wen and Wu and their campaign against the Shang. SJ Marshall has written about this in The Mandate of Heaven, revealing historical specificity in the text that had gone unnoticed for millennia.
The I Ching uses many stories from legend and myth to build up layers of significance: the story of an ancient culture hero might map onto the story of a historical figure such as Wu, and this in turn is offered as a model for later generations. One such culture hero is Yu the Great, the conqueror of the Chinese floods.
Next: the historical truth