When Heaven by its will is inspecting the kingdom,

The lower people are to be feared.

Our king showed no partiality in rewarding, no excess in

punishing;

He dared not to allow himself in indolence:

So was his appointment established over the States,

And he made his happiness grandly secure.

The capital of Shang was full of order,
The model for all parts of the kingdom.
Glorious was the king's fame;
Brilliant his energy,

Long lived he and enjoyed tranquillity,
And so he preserves us, his descendants.

We ascended the hill of Ching,

Where the pines and cypresses grew symmetrical,
We cut them down and conveyed them here;

We reverently hewed them square.

Long are the projecting beams of pine;

Large are the many pillars.

The temple was completed - the tranquil abode of the martial king of Yin.

END OF THE SHIH KING

THE YI KING

OR

BOOK OF CHANGES

"By fifty years' study of the Yi, I might come to be free from serious error."

CONFUCIUS.

"As I came not into life with any knowledge of it, and as my likings are for what is old, I busy myself in seeking knowledge there."

CONFUCIUS.

THE YI KING

(INTRODUCTION)

LEARNED Chinamen even of our own day will some

times assert that all our Western scientific knowledge, our study of electricity, heat, light, and so on, is all contained in the Yi King. They tell us that the eight "trigrams " at the basis of the Yi symbolize all this knowledge, and that it was all known to their ancient magicians. They admit, however, that they themselves had lost the power to read these mighty truths from the pages of the Yi; and Westerners are not likely to take too seriously its forgotten mysteries.

The Yi King, as explained in our introduction, consists of a series of diagrams of unknown but very vast antiquity, and of the much more modern commentaries upon these. The diagrams are now sixty-four in number, but may have been originally only eight. These eight are made up by taking two lines, one continuous and the other broken in the middle, and setting them one above the other to form three lines or trigrams, varying the relative order of the two species of line in every possible manner. A glance at the accompanying cut of the diagrams will make this clear, as also how from the eight possible trigrams, sixty-four hexagrams or combinations of six lines have been made by uniting each trigram with itself and with each other trigram. To the original trigrams very ancient mystical meanings were attached, one typifying the heavens, another high mountains, and so on, as shown in the cut. Each also represented a point of the compass.

These trigrams and hexagrams are the most ancient known instrument of magic. They are still employed for casting lots"; and decisions for important occasions are reached by appeal to them. This is done by reading the

marks on tortoise-shells or the arrangement of the stalks of the "Chi" plant, such as still grows by the grave of Confucius. These markings direct the soothsayer to one and another of the diagrains, and by the significance of these he judges of the future.

Something more than magic was brought into the Yi when in 1143 B.C. the celebrated Duke Wan (afterward known as King Wan, founder of the Chau Dynasty) was cast into prison by a tyrant king. Wan wrote in his cell an interpretation of the sixty-four hexagrams, or rather a moral preachment based upon them. Soon afterward Wan's son, the Duke of Chau, added his commentary to that of his father. These constitute the present text of the Yi. The sixty-four commentaries are divided into two very similar sections, of which only the first is given in this volume. It discusses the first thirty, and perhaps more sacred, hexagrams.