I. Origin

Shang people used Oracle bones to predict good or bad luck, and then carved characters, dates and questions on Oracle bones with knives and pens. This is Oracle Bone Inscriptions. In the Zhou Dynasty, divination was assisted by divination, which included sixty-four hexagrams. A hexagram has six pictures, and each picture is called a hexagram. The word that determines good or bad was originally called "Yao Ci", and "Yao" means derivation.

Some words belong to the whole of hexagrams, and some words belong to each other; So it was later divided into hexagrams and texts. This kind of divination is also the divination record of the divination official, who edited the divination according to the divination order and became the Book of Changes.

Second, evolution.

1. At the end of the Warring States period, Taoism and Yin and Yang doctrines prevailed, and Confucianism was influenced by two factions. They made various new interpretations of the hexagrams in Zhouyi, and promoted Confucian philosophy through these interpretations. The content of this new explanation is the so-called Yi Zhuan.

2. In Yi Zhuan, haiku and iconology are relatively systematic. Judging the meaning of a hexagram with a haiku-"Xun" means "broken". The word "image" is equivalent to the so-called "concept". In addition, there are two biographies of classical Chinese and cohesion.

Classical Chinese explains Gankun's two hexagrams: condensing the cosmology and outlook on life, and occasionally explaining the hexagrams separately. Cohesion is the most important thing in Yi Chuan.

3. Three biographies, Shuo Gua, Xu Gua and Za Gua, were newly discovered in Han Dynasty, and were later called Yijing. Shuogua deduces the image of hexagrams and explains the concept of a hexagram in some things in nature and the world. The preface to hexagrams explains the reason why the sixty-four hexagrams are arranged in order. Miscellaneous hexagrams compares the similarities and differences of the meanings of each hexagram.

Third, status.

In the Han Dynasty, Zhouyi rose to the top of the Confucian Six Classics.