Book of Changes (Yijing)

An ancient Chinese divination manual that became one of the Confucian classics. Its core is 64 hexagrams, figures of six broken or unbroken lines, each with a name, a short judgement and a statement for each line; this layer probably dates from the Western Zhou period. Tradition credits Fu Xi with the eight trigrams, King Wen with the hexagrams and Confucius with the commentaries, but the text grew in anonymous layers. The commentaries, known as the Ten Wings, were added later and turned the oracle into a philosophy of change. The most important, the Great Commentary, presents the hexagrams as images of how heaven, earth and human affairs transform, and states that the alternation of yin and yang is called the Dao. The book teaches that change follows patterns, that situations turn into their opposites, and that the wise person reads the moment and acts in time. Wang Bi and Zhu Xi later wrote influential commentaries on it.

It sits behind much of Chinese cosmology, from Confucian and Daoist metaphysics to medicine and art, and its picture of a world made of patterned change still rewards close reading.