A Text within the Text: Historical Narratives and Zhou Changes Citations in the “Mù Hé” Chapter of the Mǎwángduī *Yìzhuàn

William Boltz (2005) argued that early Chinese texts were composed from textual “building blocks” — discrete units that once circulated independently. Evidence from excavated materials supports this view. The “Mù Hé” chapter of the excavated *Yìzhuàn (Commentaries to the Changes), unearthed from a Western Han tomb at Mǎwángduī, exemplifies this structure, comprising at least four major blocks. This paper analyses one such block: a series of six historical narratives, each ending with a citation of the Zhou Changes. Close examination reveals that the six cited hexagrams follow a deliberate logical pattern, suggesting intentional arrangement rather than coincidence. Furthermore, by tracing the relationships among the narratives and their cited hexagrams, this study demonstrates how the narratives’ messages in “Mù Hé” differ from parallel accounts in received texts. The findings show that the section with historical narratives in “Mù Hé” functions as an autonomous textual unit — one of the chapter’s “building blocks” — characterized by creative composition and distinctive rhetorical strategy.