The I Ching, or Book of Changes, began in the Western Zhou period as the Zhou Yi, a utilitarian manual for cleromancy in which diviners sorted 50 yarrow stalks to generate the numbers six through nine, translating them into broken yin and solid yang lines stacked into 64 hexagrams. This episode traces how that ancient six-bit system was transformed by the Ten Wings commentaries into a cosmological blueprint, canonized by Emperor Wu of Han in 136 BC, and fought over for centuries in the commentary wars between New Text numerologists and Old Text moralists, before Wang Bi and later Zhu Xi reshaped it yet again.

From there the text travels across East Asia and into the European Enlightenment, where Leibniz saw his own binary numbers in the hexagrams, Hegel dismissed them as empty forms, Niels Bohr drew on yin-yang complementarity to explain qu ...