Great Ultimate

The Great Ultimate is the disputed origin-point in one account of the I Ching’s lineal figures: it is said to produce the two elementary forms, which generate the emblematic symbols and then the Eight Trigrams. The translator treats this grand cosmological beginning not as the necessary source of the figures but as a later philosophical overlay, arguing that the diagrams can be explained more simply by repeatedly combining whole and divided lines.

The account of generation

The Great Ultimate appears in a passage that describes a four-stage sequence: the Great Ultimate produces the two elementary forms; these produce four emblematic symbols; and those symbols produce the Eight Trigrams. The trigrams, in turn, determine good and evil outcomes, from which proceeds the great business of life. The two elementary forms are the whole and divided lines, and their successive combinations provide the visible basis for the system.

The translator separates what can be demonstrated from what remains obscure. The lines, the four paired forms, and the eight trigrams can all be exhibited through combination; what the Great Ultimate itself means, or how it produces the first pair, is not explained by the diagrammatic sequence. He notes that the name does not occur elsewhere in the old Confucian literature and proposes that it entered this Appendix from a Taoist source in the fifth or perhaps fourth century BC.

The circle and the problem of construction

Zhu Xi represented the Great Ultimate as a circle, following the philosopher Zhou Dunyi, but cautioned readers not to suppose that this image came from Fuxi. The translator finds the circle unsuccessful as an account of how the lines originate. If a circle could unroll, he reasons, it would yield one long line; dividing that line would produce two whole lines, not the required whole and divided pair. A further division would still be needed. The image therefore does not explain the transition it is meant to represent.

Once the whole and divided lines are taken as the starting point, the construction becomes straightforward. Adding each of the two lines to the trigrams produces sixteen four-line figures; repeating the operation gives thirty-two five-line figures, and repeating it again yields the sixty-four hexagrams, each the subject of an essay in the text. The number of lines increases arithmetically, while the number of figures doubles at each stage. In this account, the Great Ultimate is not needed to generate the diagrams: their formation follows from a repeatable process of combination.

Text, interpretation, and later philosophy

The translator’s objection belongs to a broader effort to distinguish the older Text from its Appendixes and to avoid reading later doctrines back into earlier material. He rejects the assumption that the Great Treatise is concerned with a primordial substance expanding as yang and contracting as yin. In his view, the author’s subject is the changing phenomena of nature and experience, not creation or cosmogony; treating the passage as a developed theory of primary matter puts later ideas first.

That distinction also shapes his approach to translation. Chinese written characters, he argues, are symbols of ideas rather than representations of spoken words, so a literal English rendering cannot reliably reproduce the author’s thought. Translation must seek the scope of the passage and express it intelligibly, adding a word when needed to make implicit connections clear, while remaining faithful to the original meaning. His criticism of the Great Ultimate’s circular image follows the same principle: an interpretation should clarify how the system works, not impose a later picture that leaves the central transition unexplained.

The Great Ultimate thus marks a boundary between the lineal figures themselves and a cosmological explanation subsequently attached to them. The translator does not deny the historical presence of the account in the Appendix; he questions its explanatory force and its claim to represent the earliest formation of the diagrams. His preferred account begins with the lines and lets their combinations, rather than an opaque first principle, explain the full series of figures.