Wen Wang Gua Sources and Received Lineage

Your task is to build a provenance map without filling historical gaps with certainty.

This course works with received Wen Wang Gua practices visible in named sources and uses a text attributed on its checked composite title page to Yehe Laoren as a central case source. The current evidence record does not settle the personal origins of palace grouping or Na Jia line assignment. A title-page attribution is a bibliographic observation; it does not prove who invented the exact modern method or that one unchanged system passed continuously across two millennia.

Use three evidence columns

Column	What belongs there	Example from this course
Source witness	What a named artifact visibly contains	The checked Zengshan Buyi composite contains the Case 00035 question, chart, reasoning, and reported observation
Attributed lineage claim	A lineage association that needs a checkable historical locator	Any Jing Fang association remains unresolved until a suitable locator is added
UAYA course decision	A transparent editorial or teaching choice	UAYA uses Case 00035 as the low-consequence cumulative record and separates mechanics from interpretation

Add a fourth label—unresolved—for anything that does not yet have an adequate locator.

What the checked source chain establishes

The working Chinese source is a 2006 punctuated and checked composite titled 《增删卜易》——附校评. Its notice says it draws on a 1941 Shanghai Jinzhang Bookstore edition and other transcriptions. Its title page attributes the work to Yehe Laoren with editorial involvement named there.

The course cross-checks passages against two independent transcription witnesses:

• Chinese Text Project work ctp:wb497805, with stable volume and paragraph identifiers;
• Wikisource revision 2572918, whose revision pin prevents a later community edit from silently changing the cited witness.

These artifacts make the relevant Chinese passages inspectable. They do not provide a facsimile of the 1941 edition, a critical history of the work, or an authoritative English translation.

Source note: For the cumulative Case 00035, use the checked composite printed p. 90 (PDF physical p. 91), CText ctp:ws157683 displayed paragraphs 996–1003, and Wikisource revision 2572918 under 天时章第三十五. Working English translations in this course are labelled as UAYA translations rather than quoted as authoritative editions.

Claims this course does not make

The current evidence record does not establish:

• that Jing Fang authored every palace, Na Jia, line-role, and timing rule used in the modern course;
• an uninterrupted and unchanged “two-thousand-year lineage”;
• the exact identity, life dates, or compilation date of Yehe Laoren;
• that the presence of recorded outcomes proves predictive efficacy;
• that later symbolic or doctrinal disagreements can be settled by age alone.

Those statements stay out of the lesson until precise public evidence can be supplied. Removing them is more accurate than softening them into vague historical atmosphere.

Provenance exercise

Classify each statement:

1. “The checked composite prints Case 00035 in the Weather chapter.”
2. “Jing Fang invented the complete method exactly as taught today.”
3. “This course uses the exact case to teach observation before interpretation.”
4. “The reported outcome independently verifies the prediction.”

The defensible labels are source witness, unresolved, UAYA course decision, and unresolved. A source can report an outcome without independently verifying it.

Your artifact is a four-label provenance map. Next, use it to decide what kind of authority each course source may carry: How This Course Uses Zengshan Buyi and Other Sources.