Three thousand years, briefly
From cracked bones to a book of philosophy to the translation this site is built on.
The Book of Changes began as a working tool. Bronze Age diviners in China read the cracks in heated bones and turtle shells; out of that practice grew a more portable system — six-line figures built by sorting yarrow stalks, with a short oracle text attached to each figure and each line. The oldest strata of the book, the judgments and line texts, are traditionally credited to King Wen of Zhou and his son the Duke of Zhou, around the eleventh century BC, and many of the lines still read like the field notes of that founding generation: campaigns, marriages, floods, princes in exile.
From oracle to classic
Over the following centuries a body of commentary accumulated around the core text — the Ten Wings, traditionally ascribed to Confucius and his school. The Wings turned a diviner's manual into a book of philosophy: the hexagrams became a systematic picture of how situations arise, ripen and reverse, and consulting the book became a way of studying the structure of change itself. From the Han dynasty on, the I Ching stood first among the Confucian classics, read as much for wisdom as for divination, and commented on continuously for two thousand years — with Taoist readers finding in it the same watercourse view of the world as the Tao Te Ching.
Wilhelm and Baynes
Richard Wilhelm, a German missionary in Qingdao who came to feel the traffic of instruction ran mostly the other way, spent a decade translating the book with the Chinese scholar Lao Nai-hsüan, publishing his German version in 1924. Cary F. Baynes carried it into English in 1950, with a foreword by C. G. Jung, whose interest in the book — he had consulted it for years — did more than anything else to put it on Western shelves. The Wilhelm/Baynes edition, with its layered structure of text and commentary, remains the translation most readers mean when they say "the I Ching," and it is the text this site is built on.
This site
Filling Water presents the Wilhelm/Baynes text whole —every chapter, every line — with the yarrow arithmetic kept honest on the cast pageand the book's own web of relations drawn out onevery chapter page. For the books behind it, see further reading.