History

The history of the development of I Ching counts several steps:

– Fu Hsi – the mythical ancestor – brought us the eight trigrams (pa-kua) which are the basics of the hexagrams. Legends says they would have been revealed to him be a dragon emerging from water;

– Secondly in importance was King Wen, the founder of Chou dynasty, who, during the imprisonment by king You, worked for further development of the Book of Changes. Thus he would have multiply the eight trigrams to form the 64 hexagrams, assigned description for each hexagram and divinatory indications;

– His son, Duke of Chou, would have wrote the commentaries to the texts of the lines;

– The last to contribute to the development of the Book was Confucius who gave us the Wings, or the commentaries on the basic texts.

Generally speaking, I Ching is a complex book that has undergone a lot of influences both from Taoism and Confucianism, the main ethical trends of ancient China.