Confucius’ Understanding of the Relationship Between Divination and Morality of Yizhuan from the Mawangdui Silk Manuscript

Within the silk manuscript Yizhuan, Confucius underscores the priority of moral righteousness over divination, advocating the cultivation of virtue, benevolence, and righteousness as the proper way to seek auspiciousness and blessing. However, this stance serves merely as a value orientation for the study, application, and interpretation of the Zhouyi. In other words, moral virtue is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for divination. In fact, the emergence of the Zhouyi lies in the misalignment and separation between virtue and fortune. The “alignment of virtue and fortune 德福一致” formed the foundation of the early Western Zhou view of the Mandate of Heaven and served to legitimize the Zhou replacement of the Shang Dynasty. Under this understanding of the Mandate of Heaven, judgments of auspiciousness and inauspiciousness could be made based on the presence or absence of virtue, thereby reducing the relative importance of divination. Confucius’ early attitude toward the Zhouyi reflected this perspective. Nevertheless, the alignment of virtue and fortune could not adequately explain the evident inconsistency between moral conduct and human fate in reality. Consequently, by the late Spring and Autumn period, this framework gradually developed into the notion of “timely mandate” (shiming 時命), which denied a necessary correspondence between virtue and fortune. In response to this shift, the late-life Confucius and his disciples emphasized finding moral and spiritual grounding through virtue, while adopting a calm and accepting attitude toward external circumstances such as success and failure, wealth and poverty, and longevity and premature death. The shift corresponded to the transformation in the conception of the Mandate of Heaven. It was also in this context that Confucius came to value the Zhouyi in his later years.