The Origin and Early Development of the Zhou Changes
Edward L. Shaughnessy
The Zhou Changes, better known in the West as I Ching, is one of the masterpieces of world literature.
This book, the climax of more than forty years of research in Chinese archaeology, explores the text’s origins in the oracle-bone and milfoil divinations of Bronze Age China and how it transformed over the course of the Zhou dynasty into the first of the Chinese classics.
The book provides an in-depth survey of the theory and practice of divination to demonstrate how the hexagram and line statements of the text were produced and how they were understood at the time.
Edward L. Shaughnessy is the Lorraine J. and Herrlee G. Creel Distinguished Service Professor in Early Chinese Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He has published more than 20 books and over 200 scholarly articles on all aspects of ancient China’s literary heritage.
Shaughnessy, Edward. The Origin and Early Development of the Zhou Changes. Leiden: Brill, 2022. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004513945
Reviews:
Matthias Schumann and Elena Valussi
Edward L. Shaughnessy
Klaus Herbers and Hans-Christian Lehner
Tze-ki Hon
Brandon Dotson, Constance A. Cook, and Zhao Lu
Hans-Christian Lehner