King Wen of Zhou
The "Zhou yi" was traditionally ascribed to the Zhou cultural heroes King Wen of Zhou and the Duke of Zhou, and was also associated with the legendary world ruler Fu Xi. According to the canonical "Great Commentary", Fu Xi observed the patterns of the world and created the eight trigrams (), "in order to become thoroughly conversant with the numinous and bright and to classify the myriad things." The "Zhou yi" itself does not contain this legend and indeed says nothing about its own origins. The "Rites of Zhou", however, also claims that the hexagrams of the "Zhou yi" were derived from an initial set of eight trigrams. During the Han dynasty there were various opinions about the historical relationship between the trigrams and the hexagrams. Eventually, a consensus formed around 2nd-century AD scholar Ma Rong's attribution of the text to the joint work of Fu Xi, King Wen of Zhou, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius, but this traditional attribution is no longer generally accepted.