Ten Titles, Seven Works

The count is a bookkeeping convention rather than a description. Three of the commentaries are long enough that they were transmitted in two parts each, and counting the parts separately produces ten from seven works. Those seven are the commentary on the judgments attached to each hexagram, the commentary on the images, the long treatise usually called the great commentary or the appended statements, a discussion of the first two hexagrams in particular, the treatise on the trigrams, an account of the sequence in which the hexagrams stand, and a short set of paired contrasts between them. They do not agree with one another.

The great commentary offers a cosmology in which the changes model the generative process of heaven and earth; the treatise on the trigrams is a catalogue of correspondences with no argument in it; the account of the sequence rationalises an order that was probably not designed to be rationalised. Reading them as one work produces confusion that reading them as an anthology does not. What they share is a purpose. Each takes a divinatory apparatus and supplies reasons, so that the figures become an account of how change works rather than a device for asking questions. That transformation is what allowed the book into the canon.