Fuxi arrangement of the trigrams

The Fuxi arrangement of the trigrams is the traditional ordering associated with the Eight Trigrams and with the development of the hexagrams from whole and divided lines. The book uses it both as a scheme for understanding lineal figures and as a point of comparison with King Wen’s rearrangement, while cautioning that the origin story attached to it belongs to legend and that the surviving diagram is much later than the antiquity it claims to represent.

Traditional Origins and the River Map

In the account examined by the book, the Yellow River gave forth a Map that supplied Fuxi with a model for making the trigrams. The familiar story says that a dragon-horse emerged from the river bearing marks on its back, from which the figures were derived. The author regards this account as plainly fabulous, but discusses it because the Map provides a traditional explanation for numerical patterns used to interpret the figures.

The Map was said to have been kept at court in the eleventh century BC and later to have perished. Although scholars speculated about its form after the restoration of ancient texts in the Han dynasty, the first publicly circulated delineation identified by the book appeared under Hui Zong of the Song dynasty, between 1101 and 1125. Thus the arrangement’s reputed ancient model and the diagram available to later interpreters belong to markedly different evidentiary periods.

Diagram, Numbers, and Lines

The approved Map scheme described in the book consists of small circles, divided nearly equally between light and dark. Odd-numbered circles—1, 3, 5, 7, and 9—are light; even-numbered circles—2, 4, 6, 8, and 10—are dark. This division is linked to the numbers of Heaven and Earth and to the distinction between Yin and Yang, glossed as dark and bright, moon-like and sun-like. The diagram therefore connects number, contrast, and cosmological symbolism, though the author notes that the diagram’s late publication makes the historical basis of parts of the scheme uncertain.

In the lineal figures, the whole line stands for the bright circle and the divided line for the dark. The book also describes a positional convention: when lines are correct, the first, third, and fifth are whole, while the second, fourth, and sixth are divided. Whole lines are characterized as strong and associated with vigor and authority; divided lines as weak and associated with feebleness and submission. The lines’ contrast is not merely graphic: the strong are said to command and the weak to obey.

A plate presents the hexagrams in circular and square forms according to what it calls the natural process of development from whole and divided lines and the order attributed to Fuxi. That display makes the arrangement legible as a system generated from the two line types, rather than simply a list of separately named figures. The book nevertheless distinguishes this visual account of development from claims that the numbers themselves embody a universal metaphysical principle.

Relation to King Wen’s Arrangement

The book places the Fuxi order beside a different geographical arrangement attributed to King Wen. Its discussion stresses that the two arrangements should not be conflated: King Wen is said to have changed the geographical positioning of the trigrams, and the distinction matters because references in the text and in the Treatise on the Thwan depend on the symbolism and placement assigned to the figures. A comparison of the arrangements is offered through circular representations, while the plates also show the Fuxi-attributed order in circular and square formats.

This contrast gives the arrangement a role in the book’s broader account of interpretation. The trigrams are associated with natural objects, phenomena, qualities, and directions, but the author resists treating those associations as a coherent scientific classification. He questions, for example, why different trigrams can represent water in different conditions, why one can also represent the moon, and why another is assigned to both wind and wood. The Fuxi arrangement is therefore presented as an influential interpretive scheme, not as proof of a single systematic theory behind every symbolic correspondence.

Divination and the Limits of Number

The lineal figures had been used for divination well before the historical period the author considers credible. Early texts refer to divination with tortoise shell and stalks, and later practice used plant stalks to generate figures. In the procedure described in the book, forty-nine stalks were manipulated three times for each line, requiring eighteen manipulations to form a hexagram. Odd and even numbers determined strong or weak lines, and the resulting figure was interpreted through King Wen’s Thwan and the Duke of Zhou’s emblematic line statements.

Numbers in this process serve to form the figure, the author argues, rather than to disclose every possible event in nature. He distinguishes this practical role from the Pythagorean doctrine, as he understands it, in which number is the principle and cause of things. Nor, in his account, was divination meant simply to foretell the future: its purpose was to judge whether a contemplated plan or set of circumstances would prove fortunate or unfortunate. He further warns that incautious language in the Appendixes can mislead readers into treating the method as absolute foreknowledge.

The arrangement’s historical significance consequently lies in both its organizing power and its limits. It offers a visual and numerical language for constructing and reading figures, but the author separates that operation from later claims of exhaustive cosmic knowledge. Its authority also accumulated through the book’s editorial history: the I Ching survived Qin Shi Huang’s book burning because divination was among the exempted subjects; a Han imperial-library catalogue recorded works on the text and its Appendixes by thirteen authors or schools in 294 portions; and the Kangxi imperial edition of 1715 quoted 218 scholars. The Fuxi scheme thus appears within a tradition repeatedly preserved, diagrammed, interpreted, and revised, rather than as an uncontested artifact transmitted unchanged from a legendary origin.