Jiaoshi Yilin is a Chinese

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

 book of divination

I Ching divination

Among the many forms of divination is a bibliomancy method using the I Ching or Book of Changes. The book is structured as 32 pairs of hexagrams, divided in half after the first 30. The text was a subject for civil service exams in Imperial China...

 composed during the Western Han Dynasty. Modeled on the I Ching

I Ching

The I Ching or "Yì Jīng" , also known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes and Zhouyi, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts...

, the work was attributed to Jiao Yanshou (焦延壽), though not much is known about the author.

The work was one of the few surviving books of divination produced in that period of Chinese history. It contains 64 x 64 = 4096 hexagram

Hexagram (I Ching)

The I Ching book consists of 64 hexagrams.A hexagram is a figure composed of six stacked horizontal lines , where each line is either Yang , or Yin . The hexagram lines are traditionally counted from the bottom up, so the lowest line is considered line 1 while the top line is line 6...

s (I Ching contains 64); each of the hexagram is commented by a short poem (3-8 lines; each line comprises, in most cases, 4 character

Chinese character

Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...

s). Besides its historical value, the work has also been treasured for its literary merit.

External links

• Original Chinese text, which, however, requires proofreading and revision.