China and the Yi King — When the Master Burns His Own Library

"Destroy the old world. Build the new."

— Slogan of the Red Guards, 1966

The Cradle of Change

It all begins here. On the banks of the Yellow River, more than 3000 years ago, in the China of the Zhou. Someone — tradition says King Wen, prisoner of the last Shang tyrant — assembled 64 figures of six lines and gave them a name, a judgment, a meaning. The Yi King was born.

But the Yi King did not appear out of nowhere. Before King Wen, there was Fuxi (伏羲), the mythical cultural hero who, according to legend, discovered the eight trigrams by observing the patterns on the back of a turtle that emerged from the Luo River. Eight figures of three lines — the elementary bricks of reality. Heaven, Earth, Water, Fire, Thunder, Wind, Mountain, Lake. Everything that exists can be described by these eight archetypes.

King Wen combined the eight trigrams two by two: 8 × 8 = 64 hexagrams. His son, the Duke of Zhou, added the commentaries on the individual lines. And Confucius — or his disciples — wrote the "Ten Wings," the philosophical commentaries that elevated the Yi King from the status of a divination manual to that of a major philosophical text.

For 2500 years, the Yi King was the first of the Five Confucian Classics — the most venerated text of Chinese civilization. Emperors consulted it before every major decision. Scholars meditated on it their whole lives. Generals sought the right strategy in it. Doctors found diagnostic principles in it.

The Year China Burned Its Books

In 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The watchword: destroy the "Four Old Things" — old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits. The Red Guards, fanatical adolescents, swept across China.

Temples were ransacked. Buddhist statues were smashed with hammers. Ancient calligraphies were burned. Confucian scholars were publicly humiliated, beaten, sent to re-education camps. The Yi King was declared "feudal superstition" — a relic of the old world to be eradicated.

The irony is dizzying. The Yi King — the book that teaches that change is the law of the universe — was condemned in the name of revolutionary change. Mao, who wanted to transform China, destroyed the tool that China had used for three millennia to understand transformation.

Hexagram 23, Bo (剝), the Splitting Apart, describes exactly what happened. Five Yin lines gnawed at the first five Yang lines. The structure collapses. The last Yang line — the last vestige of tradition — is about to fall. The commentary says: "Decomposition reaches the house."

The house of Chinese wisdom was decomposed by its own children.

The Student Who Preserved the Treasure

While China burned its classics, a small neighboring country preserved them with absolute devotion. Korea — which had received the Yi King from China centuries earlier — kept the tradition alive. Neo-Confucian Korean scholars like Yi Hwang (Toegye) had studied the Yi King with a depth that even the Chinese admired. And when the Cultural Revolution broke the chain of transmission in China, Korea became the guardian of the treasure.

It is the paradox of history: the student preserved what the master destroyed. The Yi King survives today in part thanks to Korea — and to Japan, and to Taiwan, and to Western sinologists like Richard Wilhelm, who had translated the text into German before the storm struck.

The First Emperor, the First Book Burning

But the Cultural Revolution was not the first book burning in Chinese history. In 213 BCE, the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang had already ordered the destruction of all books — except practical treatises on agriculture, medicine, and divination. The Yi King survived this first fire thanks to its classification as a divination manual, not as a philosophical text.

Hexagram 36, Ming Yi (明夷), the Darkening of the Light, describes both periods. Fire is under Earth — light is buried, hidden, oppressed. The sage hides his brilliance. He does not disappear — he waits. The commentary says: "In the midst of adversity, keep your inner light."

During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese scholars hid copies of the Yi King — under floorboards, in attics, in personal libraries disguised as cooking manuals. The light was under the earth. But it was not extinguished.

The Return: China Rediscovers Its Treasure

Since the 1980s, and even more since the 2000s, China has been rediscovering the Yi King. The movement is massive and multifaceted: online courses, mobile applications, television programs, academic publications, state revaluation of Confucian heritage itself.

The Chinese government, which had condemned the Yi King as feudal superstition, now promotes it as national cultural heritage. The Confucius Institutes, deployed throughout the world, teach the classics — including the Yi King. This is hexagram 24, Fu (復), the Return: the Yang line is reborn at the base, beneath five Yin lines. Spring returns after winter. Tradition returns after destruction.

But something has been lost that cannot be recovered: the living transmission. For two millennia, the Yi King was transmitted from master to disciple, from father to son, in an unbroken chain of practice and understanding. The Cultural Revolution broke this chain. The old masters died in camps or in obscurity. Their knowledge — the subtleties of interpretation, the techniques of meditation on hexagrams, the practical applications to medicine, strategy, governance — departed with them.

What remains are the texts. And texts, without living transmission, are like musical scores without a musician. You can read them. You cannot hear them.

Modern China: Between Rocket and Yarrow

China in 2026 is the world's second economic power. It sends probes to the far side of the Moon, builds the world's fastest trains, dominates artificial intelligence and renewable energy. This is hexagram 1, Qian (乾), the Creator — six Yang lines, pure energy, maximum power.

And at the same time, in the parks of Beijing, retirees manipulate yarrow stalks. In restored Taoist temples, priests consult the Yi King for the faithful. On Douyin (the Chinese TikTok), influencers explain hexagrams to millions of followers. In universities, researchers publish theses on the applications of the Yi King to quantum physics, computer science, traditional medicine.

Modern China is hexagram 11, Tai (泰), Peace — or at least it tries to be. Heaven (tradition) at the bottom, Earth (modernity) at the top. The two meet. Not always harmoniously. Past and future coexist in a creative tension that only the Yi King could describe with true justice.

Leibniz and the Binary System: When the West Recognizes Genius

In 1703, German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz receives from Jesuit Joachim Bouvet, a missionary in China, a diagram showing the 64 hexagrams of the Yi King arranged according to Fuxi's order. Leibniz is astounded: he recognizes in the solid and broken lines the binary system he has just invented — the same system of 0s and 1s that, three centuries later, will be the basis of all global computing.

Yin = 0. Yang = 1. Six lines = six bits. 64 hexagrams = 64 combinations of six bits = 2⁶. The Yi King is a complete binary system, invented 3000 years before Leibniz, 3000 years before the first computer.

Coincidence? Convergence? Or recognition that binary — the dance of complementary opposites — is the fundamental language of the universe, whether in the genetic code (4 bases, 64 codons), in computing (0 and 1), or in the wisdom of the Yi King (Yin and Yang)?

The Yi King's Message for China

The Yi King has no message for China. The Yi King IS China's message — to the world and to itself. China gave the world the compass, gunpowder, paper, and printing. But its deepest gift may be the Yi King: the idea that change is not an enemy to fight but a law to understand, a flux to navigate, a dance to dance.

China burned its own library. Then it rebuilt it. This is hexagram 49 (Revolution) followed by hexagram 50 (the Cauldron) — the creative destruction that leads to a new vessel for wisdom. The cauldron is new. The fire is ancient. The soup cooking in it is the same as the one the Zhou sages were cooking 3000 years ago.

The Yi King is patient. It survived the First Emperor. It survived the Cultural Revolution. It will survive whatever comes, because its truth is indestructible: everything changes. And this sentence itself will never change.