How You Catch a Hare

The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is one of the oldest divination texts in the world and one of the strangest survival stories in the history of magic. This episode brings you the 3,000-year story of the I Ching, the world's most reinvented book of divination, from Bronze Age turtle-shell pyromancy to Carl Jung's couch and modern computing.

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.

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Transcript

Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben.

Intro
There is a story the Chinese philosopher Wang Bi liked to tell, sometime around the year 240 CE, to explain how a reader should approach one of the oldest books in the Chinese canon: “Words are the means to explain the images. Once one gets the images, he forgets the words. Images are the means to allow us to concentrate on the ideas. Once one gets the ideas, he forgets the images. Similarly, a trail or snare is how you catch a hare. Once you have the hare, you forget the trail. Traps are how you catch a fish. Once you have the fish, you forget the trap.”

Wang Bi was in his early twenties when he wrote this about the I Ching, the “Book of Changes,” a collection of sixty-four hexagrams of solid and broken lines that Chinese diviners, philosophers, emperors, physicians, and fortune-tellers had been reading and deciphering for the better part of a thousand years. He wouldn’t be the last to reinvent it. Confucian moralists, Song dynasty metaphysicians, Jesuit missionaries doing math in the margins, and a Swiss psychiatrist obsessed with coincidence would all take their turn with the same sixty-four hexagrams and walk away understanding something different every time.

The history of the I Ching is about much more than the text itself. It’s about what an extraordinary number of very different people have needed it to say. In this episode, I bring you the story of a Bronze Age turtle-shell oracle, the foundation of the Confucian classics, a Song dynasty meditation manual, and eventually a paperback on a shelf in modern bookstores everywhere: the story of the I Ching.

Cracks in the Bone
Before there was a Book of Changes, diviners sought insight by applying fire to a shoulder blade, a practice known as pyromancy. In the Shang dynasty, which ruled central China until roughly 1050 BCE, divination was a royal monopoly, mostly because of its exorbitant cost. Diviners took the shells of turtles and the flattened shoulder bones of oxen, thinned them down, and touched them with a heated brand until the material cracked. They read the pattern of the fracture as a message from the king’s own deceased ancestors, who were understood to be watching and judging his every decision. Shang kings divined about war, weather, illness, and the correct sacrifices to offer. Then the Shang fell, conquered around 1046 BCE by the Zhou, a rival power from the west, and something changed. The new rulers needed to justify why heaven had apparently switched its favor from one royal house to another, and they built an entire political philosophy out of the answer: the Mandate of Heaven, the idea that legitimate rule depends on virtue rather than birthright, and that a corrupt or careless king can simply lose the favor of the cosmos. The last Shang king was remembered afterward as a man who had stopped divining sincerely, treating the ritual as a formality rather than a genuine inquiry, and his carelessness with the cracks in the bone became, retroactively, proof that he deserved to lose the throne.

Alongside this ideological shift, pyromancy, reading cracked bone, gradually gave way to cleromancy, reading the outcome of a countable, repeatable procedure, in this case, the sorting of yarrow stalks. Archaeologists digging at sites like Zhouyuan have turned up oracle bones and pottery fragments marked with strings of numbers, things like seven-five-eight or a repeating one-six-one-six-one-six, which appear to be the numerical ancestors of the solid and broken lines that would eventually be organized into trigrams and hexagrams. Numbers, unlike cracks, could be manipulated, taught, standardized, and eventually written down as a system. And the text that grew up around this new numerical divination looked strikingly different from what had come before it. This early layer, called the Zhouyi, the Changes of Zhou, barely mentions ancestors at all. It reads instead like a manual for decision-making, with omens about crossing rivers, taking journeys, and the outcome of legal disputes sitting alongside what look suspiciously like fragments of old folk songs and battlefield rumors. Zhou diviners were no longer appeasing the dead. They were trying to figure out what to do next.

The mechanics of that divination are worth walking through, because they are stranger, and more mathematically deliberate, than most people assume. The classical method, called the Dayan or Great Expansion method, begins with fifty yarrow stalks. Before anything else happens, the diviner sets one stalk aside, untouched, and works only with the remaining forty-nine. Through a repeated process of dividing the bundle, counting off groups of four, and setting remainders aside, the diviner eventually arrives at one of four possible numbers for each of six lines: six, seven, eight, or nine. Seven and nine are yang, the solid unbroken line; six and eight are yin, the broken line. But nine and six are special. They are called “old yang” and “old yin,” lines so far along in their cycle that they are already tipping over into their opposite, and a hexagram cast with these “changing lines” doesn’t just give you one reading, it gives you a second hexagram, the shape the situation is turning into. The math of the procedure means old yang, a nine, actually turns up more often than old yin, a six, a small asymmetry built into the ritual that mirrors the broader yin-yang cosmology of expansion and contraction. A faster method using three coins came into use later, and while more convenient, it flattens out these subtle probabilities entirely, trading a piece of the yarrow method’s internal mathematical logic for speed.

That single stalk set aside at the very beginning of the yarrow ritual, doing nothing, touched by no one, would turn out to matter enormously, though nobody in the Western Zhou period could have known it. Centuries later, the philosopher and politician Wang Bi would seize on precisely that detail. He argued that the forty-nine active stalks represent what Daoist philosophy calls “somethingness,” the busy, differentiated, countable stuff of the world, while the single untouched stalk represents “nothingness,” the silent, unified space, without which the other forty-nine would have no meaning at all. It is a genuinely unique idea to build a metaphysics out of a leftover yarrow stalk, but it demonstrates that, from its very first ritual gesture, the I Ching already contained the seeds of much larger ideas.

The Hare and the Snare
For roughly its first three or four centuries of existence, the Zhouyi remained a practical manual used by professional diviners, but during the late Warring States period and early Han dynasty, it became much more. Finally, in 136 BCE, Emperor Wu of Han formally installed it as the first of the Confucian Five Classics, turning a practical divination manual into a cornerstone of political philosophy, thanks largely to a set of appended commentaries known collectively as the Ten Wings. The most consequential of these, the Dazhuan, reframed the sixty-four hexagrams as a mathematical mirror of the entire cosmos, a complete, closed system that duplicated the movement of the Dao itself, the formless, eternal foundation of all things. This text also incorporated into the I Ching the concepts of yin and yang, the active masculine and passive feminine principles, which are absent from the bare Western Zhou text. The Dazhuan also introduced the concept of ji, incipience, the almost imperceptible first stirring of a change before it becomes visible to ordinary perception. A wise person, a junzi, who can perceive ji early enough can act while a crisis is still small enough to redirect, nudging catastrophe into fortune before anyone else even notices something is wrong. Divination, in this new framing, was no longer about appeasing the dead or even simply predicting an outcome. It was training one’s attention to detect the slightest hint of change.

We get a vivid glimpse of this new philosophical and moralized I Ching in a historical chronicle that tells the story of a noblewoman named Lady Mu Jiang. Imprisoned for her role in a political conspiracy, Lady Mu Jiang consulted the I Ching and drew hexagram seventeen, ordinarily read as a fortunate sign. Her diviner told her the outlook was good, but she refused to accept the reading. Instead, she took the four ritual terms attached to the hexagram’s judgment, yuan, heng, li, and zhen, and reinterpreted them one by one as moral virtues: the wellspring of goodness, the height of excellence, harmony with what is right, and the anchor of right action. Then she looked at her own conduct and concluded that she possessed none of these virtues in sufficient measure, and therefore the fortunate reading simply couldn’t apply to a person like her. It’s a remarkable scene, a prisoner essentially overruling her own oracle on ethical grounds, and it captures the fact that the same sixty-four hexagrams were doing an entirely different job in the Zhou period than they did in the Shang.

Which brings us back to the young philosopher Wang Bi. By the time he arrived on the intellectual scene in the third century CE, the Han dynasty had collapsed, and its dominant approach to the I Ching, a school later called Xiangshu, Images and Numbers, had developed into a complex numerological system. Scholars had spent two centuries matching the six lines of every hexagram to the twelve earthly branches and ten heavenly stems of the calendar, layering on the five phases, and producing techniques that bypassed the literal text of the I Ching altogether in favor of pure calendrical calculation which went beyond telling what would happen to the exact date it would happen. It also, in the eyes of its critics, turned the book into an enormous, joyless calculating machine, and some later commentators noted that Han scholars also had excellent financial incentives to keep the system as complicated as possible, since complexity meant longer, more lucrative tutorials for paying students.

Wang Bi critiqued all of this in an essay called “Clarifying the Images,” which he attached to his own commentary on the Changes. His argument, boiled down, is the hare-and-snare parable we started with: words exist to convey images, images exist to convey ideas, and once you have the idea, you should let go of the image, the way a satisfied hunter forgets the trap that caught his dinner. Han scholars, in his telling, had done exactly the opposite. They had fallen in love with the trap. They insisted, for instance, that the hexagram Kun must always and only represent a literal cow, because the text happens to mention one, missing entirely that the cow is a metaphor for a certain kind of receptive, yielding quality, applicable to a hundred different situations that have nothing to do with cattle.

From here Wang Bi built something close to a full philosophical system. Each of the sixty-four hexagrams, he argued, is not a fixed slot in a cosmic calendar but an autonomous situation, shi, a self-contained scenario like “difficulty at the beginning” or “youthful folly,” that a person could apply directly to whatever they were facing without needing to first run a battery of astronomical calculations. The six lines of a hexagram became, in his reading, six different players or options within that situation, room to maneuver rather than fixed positions on a clock. And outcomes were no longer preordained by cosmic mechanics but hinged on shi in its other sense, timeliness, whether a person had the wisdom to act rightly at precisely the right moment. He illustrated this with a paradox involving the final two hexagrams of the sequence. He treated Jiji, After Completion, which looks perfectly ordered on paper, as a trap for complacency, since the appearance of total order breeds carelessness. Likewise, he read Weiji, Before Completion, which looks like total disarray, as full of promise, precisely because its incompleteness leaves room to act.

A century after Wang Bi’s death at just twenty-three, another scholar finished his commentary work, and in 653 CE the Tang court, under Emperor Taizong, commissioned an official state edition of the classics called the Zhouyi Zhengyi, the True Meaning of the Changes of the Zhou. The scholar tasked with compiling it chose Wang Bi’s reading as the orthodox standard, which meant that for the next several centuries, every aspiring imperial bureaucrat sitting the civil service examinations studied the Changes through the eyes of a philosopher who had died before turning twenty-four.

Talismans, Turtles, and Trigrams
The debate about how best to interpret the I Ching didn’t end there. It migrated to the intellectual hothouse of the Song dynasty, where the great Neo-Confucian synthesizers tried to work out the proper relationship between the cosmos and human values. Cheng Yi, working firmly in Wang Bi’s tradition, used the I Ching as a moral textbook, teaching the literati to choose righteousness over personal advantage, and he actively discouraged people from using the book for practical fortune-telling at all.

His successor, the towering Song philosopher Zhu Xi, thought both the numerologists and the moralists had gotten something wrong. Instead, Zhu Xi insisted on a return to origins. The I Ching, he said, was always fundamentally a book of divination, and pretending otherwise was dishonest. Instead, he reframed the yarrow-stalk ritual as a tool for mental discipline. Performed slowly, in a quiet, structured setting, the physical act of sorting and counting stalks was meant to still a person’s selfish desires, clearing the mind until it became as calm and responsive as the mind of a sage, capable of perceiving that same incipient stirring of change, ji, that the old Dazhuan commentary had praised centuries earlier. Divination, for Zhu Xi, became a means of exercising and refining moral effort. However, the I Ching’s reputation for bottomless depth eventually became something of a joke. Song and later Qing scholars warned that I Ching studies were deep enough to swallow a scholar’s entire career, and the Qing dynasty’s own Emperor reportedly instructed his tutors not to make the Changes appear simple, since some of the most eminent scholars of his court were known to spend an entire month lecturing on the meaning of a single hexagram.

While philosophers were busy rewriting the metaphysics, the eight trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams were doing an entirely different kind of work out in the world, functioning as a kind of universal filing system for Chinese esoteric practice generally. Geomancers building the Luopan compass used trigram arrays to evaluate the energetic alignment of a building or a grave, in both the yin feng shui of tombs and the yang feng shui of the living. Physicians mapped the human body onto trigram cosmology, correlating pulse readings, acupuncture points, and the circulation of qi with yin-yang dynamics and hexagram transformations. Daoist priests and temple vendors inscribed trigrams onto paper talismans called fu, which were burned, and, in some traditions, the ashes were mixed into water and swallowed by the faithful seeking protection or healing. And at every social level, from an emperor deciding whether to purge a rival faction to a peasant picking a lucky day to build a bridge or arrange a marriage, the same sixty-four hexagrams served as practical, everyday guidance. It’s easy, sitting with Wang Bi and Zhu Xi, to think of the I Ching purely as elite philosophy. For most of the people who consulted it across its three-thousand-year history, it was closer to a very sophisticated, very portable oracle, consulted the way one might consult a doctor or a lawyer, for a specific problem with a specific, practical stake.

Given its deep roots in Chinese culture and philosophy, it may come as a surprise that the I Ching’s final transformation happened far outside China. In the seventeenth century, the German polymath Gottfried Leibniz, corresponding with Jesuit missionaries who had studied the hexagrams in Beijing, became convinced that the solid and broken lines of the I Ching were an ancient anticipation of his own binary arithmetic, zero and one arranged into every possible combination across six positions. He wasn’t entirely correct about what the ancient diviners thought they were doing, but the resemblance was real enough that the I Ching has been cited ever since as a kind of accidental prehistory of computing.

In the twentieth century, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung took the book somewhere else entirely, treating it as a working demonstration of what he called synchronicity, meaningful coincidence outside the chain of ordinary cause and effect, and reading the hexagrams as expressions of universal psychological archetypes rather than predictions about external events. Around the same period, the physicist Niels Bohr became fond of the yin-yang symbol as a visual shorthand for his own principle of complementarity, the idea that two seemingly contradictory descriptions, like a particle and a wave, can both be true of the same underlying reality. None of these men were reading the book the way a Shang diviner, a Han cosmologist, or a Song moral philosopher had read it. Each of them, in Wang Bi’s terms, caught an entirely new hare using the same trap.

That drift has continued into the present, where the I Ching shows up correlated with everything from DNA structures to stock market timing, much of it pop-psychology dressed up in ancient authority. But it’s worth noting that this newest layer of interpretation, however thin some of it may be, is doing exactly what every previous layer did: taking an ancient, spare, endlessly reusable symbolic structure and asking it a completely new question.

Conclusion
Return, for a moment, to that single yarrow stalk, set aside untouched at the very start of the ritual, the one Wang Bi read as nothingness itself, the silent pivot that gives meaning to everything counted around it. There is something fitting about the fact that the most enduring book in Chinese history was built around an empty space, a deliberate gap left for each new reader to fill. A Shang king filled it with the anger of his ancestors. A Zhou strategist filled it with practical calculation. Han scholars filled it with the mathematics of the calendar. A twenty-something prodigy named Wang Bi filled it with a hunter’s parable about hares and snares. Zhu Xi filled it with the discipline of a quieted mind. A missionary’s letter home filled it with binary code, and a Swiss psychiatrist filled it with the architecture of the unconscious.

What almost none of these readers did was mistake the trap for the fish. They took what they needed and moved on, and the book, remarkably, let them. Perhaps that is the real secret of its three-thousand-year survival: not that the I Ching contains one deep, final truth waiting to be excavated, but that it was built, from its very first cracked shell and its first sorted handful of yarrow stalks, to be endlessly, generously, forgotten and refilled.

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me with original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. If you want to learn more be sure to check out the sources link in the show notes. Special thanks to Enchanted’s Patreon patrons for supporting the production of this and every episode. If you want to support Enchanted, please visit patreon dot com slash enchantedpodcast. If you’re looking for a way to support the show that won’t cost you anything, you can always give Enchanted: The History of Magic & Witchcraft a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Audible, or wherever you listen and recommend it to your friends. You can get in touch with me via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow on Bluesky at enchantedpodcast. As always, for more information and special features, visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.