Chinese Divination: Primary Sources and Further Reading

Read these two first

Two texts, read before anything else, will orient a reader better than any amount of secondary literature.

The first is the "Great Treatise" (系辞) among the Ten Wings of the Yijing. It contains the description of the milfoil procedure — the only classical account of how a hexagram was actually generated — set within the philosophical framework that transformed the book. Reading the procedure and the philosophy side by side, in the same document, shows exactly how the two layers relate.

The second is the "Against Physiognomy" chapter of the Xunzi, together with the sceptical chapters of Wang Chong's Lunheng. These establish something a modern reader is likely to assume is untrue: rigorous, empirically argued scepticism about the divinatory arts is native to the Chinese tradition and present from an early date. Approaching this whole subject as a contest between Chinese tradition and Western science is a misunderstanding, and reading these texts is the fastest cure for it.

Oracle bone material and reference works

• Jiaguwen Heji (甲骨文合集) — the standard comprehensive collection of oracle-bone inscriptions, the foundation for all serious work.
• Dong Zuobin's periodisation — the division of the inscriptions into five periods by diviner group and calligraphic style, which made it possible to date individual pieces and therefore to write a history from them.
• Wang Guowei's studies using ancestral names in the inscriptions to check the Shang royal genealogy in the Shiji; the classic demonstration of the method.
• Modern handbooks of oracle-bone script — necessary for anyone reading the inscriptions directly, since the script differs substantially from later forms.
• Excavation reports from Yinxu — for the archaeological context: where the bones were found, how they were stored, and what else was in the pits.

One point of method matters here. Read the oracle bones as archaeology and palaeography, not as a divination manual. They tell us an enormous amount about the Shang and essentially nothing about whether the practice worked.

The Yijing: text and scholarship

For the Yijing itself, two kinds of source are useful. Richard Wilhelm's classic translation, later rendered into English, introduced the Book of Changes to a wide Western audience and remains widely read, though modern scholarship has refined many of its interpretations. For historical context, the works of Richard J. Smith place the Yijing and the wider divination arts within the whole world of Chinese mantic practice, showing how oracle, almanac, and astrology formed a single coherent system.

Three further things are worth having for the Yi specifically. A reliable modern translation with the layers marked, so that judgement, line statements and Wings are visually distinguishable rather than run together. The excavated versions — the Mawangdui silk manuscript with its different hexagram sequence, the Shanghai Museum Chu slips, and the Fuyang slips with their appended divinatory judgements — which together demonstrate that the received text is one settled outcome among several possible ones. And Zhu Xi's Zhouyi Benyi, which is unusual among the philosophical commentaries in taking the divinatory procedure seriously and describing it carefully.

Transmitted divination books and institutional records

• Huozhulin (火珠林) — pseudonymously attributed, the early representative of the coin-casting line from which six-line divination descends.
• Zengshan Buyi (增删卜易) and Bushi Zhengzong (卜筮正宗) — the Ming and Qing manuals that made hexagram casting learnable from a book, taught through large numbers of worked cases.
• Yilin (易林), attributed to Jiao Yanshou — an early attempt to standardise divinatory answers by supplying verses for every hexagram.
• Zhouli, "Offices of Spring" — the record of the official divinatory posts, showing how thoroughly the practice was institutionalised.
• Shiji, the accounts of turtle-and-milfoil specialists and of day-selection specialists — Sima Qian recording the trade while declining to vouch for it.
• Temple lot collections — the Guanyin, Guandi and Mazu sets, worth reading as popular literature and as evidence of what people actually asked about.

Chinese-language scholarship

Li Ling's Zhongguo Fangshu Kao and its sequel remain the foundation for the divinatory arts as a whole, integrating excavated material with the transmitted record. Work on the Shuihudi Daybooks, including Liu Lexian's monograph, shows what ordinary use looked like at a datable moment. Jiang Xiaoyuan's history-of-science writing supplies a model for how these materials should be assessed.

For the Yijing specifically, the modern scholarly literature on the dating and stratification of the text — separating the line statements from the Ten Wings — is more useful to a first-time reader than any commentary, because it settles what one is actually reading before interpretation begins.

The standing caution applies: a number of Chinese-language books in this field teach the practice rather than analyse it. Such works are legitimate sources for what practitioners believe and unreliable as scholarship, and the difference is often not apparent from the cover.

International scholarship

For the earliest history of Chinese divination, the oracle bones of the Shang dynasty are the essential starting point, and the works of David N. Keightley are the standard guide in English. His studies reconstruct how Shang kings used turtle shells and ox bones to consult their ancestors, and they explain how the inscriptions became the earliest record of the Chinese language. These books are scholarly but rewarding for any serious reader.

Richard J. Smith remains the general starting point in English for divination across Chinese society. For the oracle bones, David Keightley's work on Shang divination and the making of the sources is the standard English-language treatment, and is exceptionally good on what the inscriptions can and cannot tell us. Historians of Chinese science, Ho Peng Yoke and Joseph Needham among them, cover the calculational apparatus and its relationship to the calendar and to astronomy.

Western and Chinese scholarship have complementary strengths here, as elsewhere in this section: the Chinese literature is stronger on textual lineage and philology, the Western on social function and on the epistemological questions. Reading only one gives a distorted picture.

Anthropology and decision research

This category is not usually included in bibliographies on Chinese divination, and it should be, because it contains the strongest arguments that the practice does something real.

Omar Khayyam Moore's 1957 paper on Naskapi scapulimancy is the classic statement of the case that divinatory randomisation can be functionally adaptive — preventing over-exploitation of a hunting ground and defeating prey adaptation — while the practitioners' own account of it is mistaken.

Steven Levitt's coin-toss study approaches the same territory from experimental economics, finding that people directed towards change by a random device reported greater wellbeing later, consistent with a general bias towards excessive caution.

Alongside these, the general literature on the psychology of belief — the Forer effect, confirmation bias, selective memory — explains the subjective conviction that a reading was accurate. Read together, these two bodies of work support a position that is neither credulous nor dismissive, and that is the position these pages have tried to occupy.

Cautions for using this material

• Attributions are conventions. Divination books are routinely credited to King Wen, the Duke of Zhou, Zhuge Liang or the Hemp-Robed Taoist. This places a book in a lineage; it says nothing about who wrote it.
• Distinguish the three layers of the Yi before reading any commentary, or you will attribute Han philosophy to the early Zhou.
• Separate scholarship from instruction. A great deal that is formatted as history is written to teach a practice.
• Distrust undated claims. Six-line divination in its current form is a Tang-Song development, not high antiquity, and popular books rarely say so.
• Nothing here supports medical, legal or financial decisions, and no reputable source in this bibliography claims otherwise.

A suggested order: the Xici and the Xunzi chapter first; then a scholarly account of the Yi's composition; then one traditional manual read straight through; then the archaeology; then the anthropology and psychology last. Taken in that sequence the material largely interprets itself.

Key points

• These pages draw on scholarly studies, classic translations and general reference works.

• David N. Keightley is the standard English guide to Shang oracle-bone divination.

• For the Yijing, Richard Wilhelm’s classic translation remains widely used.

• Modern scholarly translations and studies give a more historically grounded reading.

• General scholarship on Chinese popular religion covers temple lots and coin casting.

• Psychology-of-belief literature explains why readings feel convincing.

• Together these allow the subject to be seen as archaeology, philosophy, popular practice and set of claims.

Sources drawn on for this article include: David N. Keightley's studies of Shang oracle-bone divination, Richard J. Smith's histories of Chinese divination and the Yijing, Richard Wilhelm's classic translation of the Book of Changes, general scholarship on Chinese religion and temple practice, and the psychology-of-belief literature.