I’ve just been looking at an article by Edward Shaughnessy about the Fuyang Zhouyi: a fragmentary copy of the earliest part of the Yi, dating from 165BC. And what struck me most forcibly was how little has changed.
The fragments show hexagram and line texts more or less identical to what we divine with now. But they have extra notes added, for instance:
‘Great Possession. Success from the source. [‘Prime receipt’ in Shaughnessy’s version.] In divining about rain, it will not rain.‘
or 13, line 4:
‘Nine in the Fourth: Riding its high wall: it cannot be (attacked;
lucky.) … there will be something done that will not be completed.‘
It reminds me of the conversations that go on at the I Ching Community all the time.
‘I received this line a while back, about getting my car fixed, and it turned out nothing serious was wrong…’
‘Oh, I had it about travel insurance…’
and so on. The same conversation, the same small gathering of personal experience, a couple of thousand years on..