u/Selderij

The ☱ 兌 Duì trigram, the name of which means "joy", "opening a passage" and "going through", is associated with the natural image of 澤 zé, meaning "marsh", in the I Ching commentary on the greater images (i.e. the one that tells what the noble person or a king of old would do in each hexagram). It's most often translated as "lake", but that is a mistranslation.

In ancient Chinese, 澤 zé means low-lying and well-watered open terrain: marsh(y), marshland, mere; palustral, according to Kroll's Classical Chinese dictionary. Actual words for "lake" would have been 湖 hú or 潢 huáng, or possibly 池 chí (meaning pool or a small lake). The Ten Wings commentary writers (in ca. 4th to 2nd century BC) had every opportunity to use another word for it if it was truly intended to mean "lake". It may be worthy of note that the Zhouyi (the core oracle text) makes no mention at all of trigrams.

This would mean that the translations that insist on "lake" did not do their homework on the terminology, or opted to continue a misguided convention likely stemming from an oversight in Richard Wilhelm's 1924/1950 translation; previously in 1882, James Legge translated it as "[waters of a] marsh".

Furthermore, many translations replace the trigrams' actual names with their associated images, occluding the fact that the trigrams' names have their own separate meanings – e.g. Creative/Forceful/Masculine becomes Heaven, Shock/Arousing becomes Thunder, Clinging/Intertwining becomes Fire, and so on.

Just something that has recently bothered me in the I Ching translation scene.

I wanted to find out whether records of ancient divinations support the assumption that the yarrow stalk method was originally supposed to have weighted odds in whether the moving lines are yin (25 % chance) or yang (75 % chance). As we know, the yarrow stalk method we currently know was a standard-setting reconstruction by Song dynasty I Ching commentator Zhu Xi (1130–1200).

The Zuozhuan (published ca. late 4th century BC), a commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, is one of the oldest records of Yi divinations, and as such it may serve as a good data point. I looked at Zuo Tradition – Zuozhuan : Commentary on the “Spring and Autumn Annals” (translated and introduced by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li and David Schaberg) and searched for instances of "hexagram" in the text, writing down the hexagrams gotten in the mentioned divinations. The results are as follows:

---

䷓ ䷋ 1 moving yin line

䷂ ䷇ 1 moving yang line

䷍ ䷀ 1 moving yin line

䷑

䷵ ䷥ 1 moving yin line

䷍ ䷥ 1 moving yang line

䷶ ䷝ 1 moving yin line

䷆ ䷒ 1 moving yin line

䷗

䷮ ䷛ 1 moving yin line

䷗ ䷚ 1 moving yin line

䷣ ䷎ 1 moving yang line

䷂

䷂ ䷇ 1 moving yang line

---

According to this data (the gathering method of which may be faulty and hasty, I'll admit), the instances of yin and yang moving lines in the example divinations are 7 yin and 4 yang, which would be hard to attain with the Song dynasty yarrow stalk method. A conspicuous peculiarity in the examples is that there is ever just one moving line, never more, which may be due to a different method in generating a single moving line for an already-built hexagram. A counterargument for the evidentiary value of this set would be that the examples were hand-picked, and that the set is ultimately quite small.

Regardless, this was a very interesting finding, and it may be used to argue against the historical faithfulness of Zhu Xi's yarrow stalk method's yang-leaning odds.

Might there be any other ancient divination records that I could take a peek at?