Hexagram Lines

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A hexagram line is the atlas's entry for one of the six stacked positions that make up a single hexagram in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination text often called the Book of Changes. Each hexagram is built from six horizontal lines read from the bottom upward, and every line is either broken, called yin, or unbroken, called yang, so one entry here records a single position, which form it takes at that spot, and the traditional judgment text attached to it.

A line's traditional meaning depends heavily on where it sits in the stack, not only on whether it is broken or unbroken. The same broken line near the bottom of a hexagram commonly carries a different reading from an identical broken line at the top, since the six positions are conventionally read as a loose progression from a situation just beginning at the base to one already passing at the summit, and an entry records that positional sense alongside the line's own judgment.

A changing line, one singled out in a given reading as unstable, is what turns one hexagram into a second, related hexagram, and it is usually the line a diviner is told to weigh most carefully. The atlas records each line as its own distinct entry because a hexagram's overall reading and any one line's own judgment text are two connected but separate layers of the same passage, not one standing in for the other.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The line texts read today descend from an uneven transmission stretched across many centuries. The divinatory core of the I Ching, its sixty four hexagrams and their line judgments, reached roughly its present form by the early Zhou dynasty, while the commentaries that explain and moralize the lines, collectively called the Ten Wings and traditionally credited to Confucius, were added considerably later, and modern textual scholarship treats the two layers as historically distinct rather than as one continuous work by a single author.

That layered history became far easier to study directly after 1973, when archaeologists excavated a set of silk manuscripts at Mawangdui, near Changsha, sealed inside a tomb closed in 168 BC. The Mawangdui text arranges its hexagrams in a different order than the version familiar today and occasionally attaches a different judgment to the same line, giving scholars a datable, physical checkpoint for how the wording had already begun to vary well over two thousand years earlier than any previously known copy could show.

Publishing a translation built directly from that manuscript, rather than from the later received text alone, let readers see for the first time how much of the line judgments long taken as fixed had in fact shifted across the centuries separating the Mawangdui burial from the version still printed and consulted today, a gap textual scholars now treat as ordinary for any text copied and recopied by hand over two millennia.