During the early Han dynasty (206 bce-220 ce) a set of poetic commentaries known as the “Ten Wings” became permanently attached to the Yijing, and the text received imperial sanction as one of the five major Confucian classics. These Ten Wings—particularly the so-called Great Commentary (Dazhuan or Xici zhuan)—articulated the Yijing’s implicit cosmology (a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of the universe) and invested the classic with a new philosophical flavor and an attractive literary style. The worldview of this amplified version of the Yijing emphasized correlative thinking, a humane cosmological outlook, and a fundamental unity between heaven, Earth, and people. For the next two thousand years or so the Yijing held pride of place in China as the “first of the [Confucian] classics.”
In the fashion of classic texts in other major civilizations, the Yijing had a profound effect on Chinese culture from the Han dynasty to the end of the imperial era (1912 ce) in areas such as philosophy, religion, art, literature, political life, social customs, and even science. Thinkers of every philosophical persuasion—Confucians, Daoists, and Buddhists alike—found inspiration in the language, symbolism, imagery, cosmology, epistemology (the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge), ontology (a branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being), and ethics of the Yijing. The Yijing also inspired a landslide of artistic and literary productions and provided an analytical vocabulary that proved extraordinarily serviceable in a wide variety of realms. During premodern times Chinese “scientists” used hexagram symbolism and Yijing-derived numerology (the study of the occult significance of numbers) and mathematics to explain a wide range of natural processes and phenomena in fields of knowledge that are today’s physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, meteorology, and geology.
The Yijing’s great prestige and multifaceted cultural role in China commended it to a number of civilizations on the Chinese periphery—notably, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Tibet. In all of these environments the Yijing enjoyed an exalted reputation and was employed in a variety of cultural realms. Not surprisingly, through time the Yijing came to be used and understood in ways that reflected the particular needs and interests of the “host” environment, and in the process the Yijing became less of an alien “Chinese” document and more of a “domestic” one. Thus, for example, its symbolism came to be used in Japan to express distinctively Japanese sensibilities, such as those connected with the tea ceremony and flower arranging. This process of domestication also allowed a scholar such as Jiun Sonja (1718-1804), who claimed that “every word of the Ekikyo [Yijing] is interesting and significant,” to argue that “the whole book has been completely borrowed [by the Chinese] from us [the Japanese]” (Ng 2000,107).
Similar processes of appropriation and adaptation took place in the West. A group of seventeenth-century
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World History
