3 Quotes by Hellmut and Richard Wilhelm Understanding the I Ching

The first, clearer, type suggests the musical pattern of theme and variations. The chosen theme persists through the six stages, in various aspects. The second type is more difficult to analyze. A recurrent leitmotiv is lacking here; instead six differerent stages whose connection is usually an inner one are joined together in mosaic fashion. But on both types, the so-called judgment is the tenor which is maintained through all the changes.

(T)he essential thing is to keep in mind all the strata that go to make up the book. Archaic wisdom from the dawn of time, detached and systematic reflections of the Confucian school in the Chou era, pithy sayings from the heart of the people, subtle thoughts of the leading minds: all these disparate elements have harmonized to create the structure of the book as we know it.

There are many indications that the hexagrams were the original images from which the trigrams were then later abstracted and that the configurations of double lines are derrived from a still later anaysis.