The Ten Wings

The count is a bookkeeping convention rather than a description. Three of the commentaries are long enough that they were transmitted in two parts each, and counting the parts separately produces ten from seven works. Those seven are the commentary on the judgments attached to each hexagram, the commentary on the images, the long treatise usually called the great commentary or the appended statements, a discussion of the first two hexagrams in particular, the treatise on the trigrams, an account of the sequence in which the hexagrams stand, and a short set of paired contrasts between them. They do not agree with one another.

The great commentary offers a cosmology in which the changes model the generative process of heaven and earth; the treatise on the trigrams is a catalogue of correspondences with no argument in it; the account of the sequence rationalises an order that was probably not designed to be rationalised. Reading them as one work produces confusion that reading them as an anthology does not. What they share is a purpose. Each takes a divinatory apparatus and supplies reasons, so that the figures become an account of how change works rather than a device for asking questions. That transformation is what allowed the book into the canon.

Tradition assigned the commentaries to Confucius, and the ascription did real work: it is what made a divination manual a classic that a scholar could study without embarrassment. It was not accepted indefinitely. A Song dynasty scholar argued on internal grounds that the great commentary could not be by one hand and could not be Confucius's, pointing to inconsistencies and to passages that quote as though from elsewhere, and the doubt has been part of the discussion ever since.

Modern scholarship places the commentaries across several hands and a long period, in the Warring States and early Han, and reads them as the deposit of a developing tradition of interpretation rather than the work of a single author or school. The strongest evidence arrived in the twentieth century from a tomb. Silk manuscripts recovered there include a version of the classic with commentaries that are not the ones transmitted, overlapping only partly with the received set. That shows the wings were still an open collection at the time the tomb was sealed, and that what became the standard ten was one selection among others. The received grouping is therefore a decision taken at some point in the Han rather than an inheritance from the classic's own formation.