The Great Vessel Blog

A Short History of the Yijing

A Short History of Change is now online. We will be posting quite a few pieces this week so you might want to keep an eye on What’s New as we will not be covering them all here.

Throughout history famous people have said some version of, “History is written by the Victors.” My favourite example of this is the modern mythical image of the historical English feudal lord who supposedly oppressed his serfs with his castle troops. It was a French historian who asked the question, “Where did he get the troops from?” He went on to show that these lords raised their armies from their estates and that the same people farmed his lands, shod his horses and milled his grain. Indeed there was little overt oppression as these communities, including the Feudal Lord, existed in a complex set of mutual obligations. He went on to explore the institution of the Vestry. This was the fore-runner of the Parish Council. Any man who had property or a trade was automatically a member. They would meet to decide how the commonly owned land should be farmed and to decide who would do what work on it and when. The produce from this land was shared throughout the community. The Vestry also relieved hardship in the community with alms and services. This was an old Saxon tradition which was essentially socialist in nature. Then came the Industrial Revolution and history was rewritten. The new industrialists fighting for control in Parliament (See the Corn Laws as an example) and for the hearts and minds of the people, developed the myth of the callous and cruel Feudal Lord. Such a myth served to maintain the peoples belief that no matter how grim those ‘Dark Satanic Mills’ of the new towns became, they had to be better than what went before.

More recently I was watching an episode of the X-Files. A Navaho Indian Shaman said, “Each new government rewrites history to support its cause… they write with the blood of murdered truth.” In this context it is not surprising that we have a number of views on the history of the Yijing. It is quite possible that the myth that its early authors included the great culture heroes Yu the Great, King Wen, Duke Zhou and Confucius, was a culturally acceptable way of giving it the authority it deserved at the time. However what we find is that the Yijing has grown and metamorphosed as it was transmitted through each epoch. From time to time it underwent redactions such as the one which produced the Palace Edition from where we get our Wilhelm Baynes edition.

The history of the Yijing reflects it as a cultural artefact which has had to continually find new garb and a new voice in order to reach across to each period and culture. To attempt to freeze it in any particular shape or form is perhaps to write it in the blood of murdered truth.