The I Ching
A divination manual becomes a book of philosophy about change.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 500 years
- Known to
- ± 200 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
The Zhou Yi assigns meanings to sixty-four hexagrams built from broken and unbroken lines, generated by sorting yarrow stalks, and is used for divination from early Zhou times. Later commentaries turn it into a systematic account of change, complementarity and process. Leibniz noticed that the hexagrams map onto binary numbers, and the book has had a long second life in Western thought — read by Jung, Bohr and a great many others.