| Chapter 1: | Uproarious Prologue |
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The Classic of Changes includes a commentary explanation justifying its reliance on a formal stratum—the lines composing a hexagram—and a network of images underlying the written text.
The discussion between Confucius and his interlocutor forewarns the reader that the major concern of a divination text is not to exhaust ambiguity and render perfect clarity to language but rather to limn language with form, to find the derivatives at the limits of its boundaries. Its fullest expression is musical.
This passage, “yan bu jin yi 
,” became the locus classicus for an extensive discussion on the limits of language, whether writing was coextensive with language and language with thought. The design of the Wenxin Diaolong (Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons), the first great treatise on literary theory, reflects the Yi jing tradition in an odd way. The book consists of ten juan each with five topics concerning features of literary criticism. The final topic of the fifty focuses on “Ordering Intention.” Liu Xie (ca. 465–ca. 520), its author, specifically invokes the number fifty as presented in the “Xi ci” section—the number of divination sticks and therefore the “body” of the oracle, as opposed to the “use” (i.e., the forty-nine yarrow stalks remaining after the first stalk is removed, as if the one stick is the “switch” to turn the oracle on). This final chapter cannot be fully complete, as the others are; to be switched on, it has to be put in abeyance. To conclude, the author reminds the reader that language does not comprehensively express intention (yan bu jin yi). One’s intention cannot be exhaustively