Huang He

The Yellow River carries two sharply different kinds of significance in the book: tradition makes it the source of a diagram that inspired the trigrams, while historical interpretation identifies its crossing as a decisive obstacle in the Zhou campaign against the Shang. The river thus stands at the meeting point of the I Ching’s legendary cosmology, its divinatory techniques, and a revolution whose success depended on waiting for the right moment.

The River Map Tradition

An account in the appendixes says that Heaven and Earth undergo transformations that the sages imitated in the I Ching, and that the Yellow River produced a map from which they drew. In the popular story described by the translator, a dragon-horse emerged from the river bearing a pattern of marks; Fuxi took the arrangement as a model when making the Eight Trigrams. The book also notes references to a river map in the Record of Rites and to an object reportedly kept at court in 1079 BC, though it treats the dragon-horse story as evidently fabulous rather than reliable history.

The map’s later reception has its own history. The original object was said to have perished, and speculation about its appearance continued after the restoration of the ancient classics in the Han dynasty. The first published drawing of the scheme, according to the translator, appeared under the Song dynasty emperor Hui Zong, in 1101–1125. Because the surviving representation was so late, the translator questions whether it accurately reproduces a Zhou-era design.

Legend and the Formation of the Figures

The translator distinguishes the river-map account from what he considers the more convincing explanation of how the lineal figures arose. In his view, the figures can be generated by combining whole and divided lines; once those basic forms are accepted, their combinations readily yield the hexagrams. The map tradition, by contrast, may have lent the trigrams a supernatural authority and encouraged religious veneration. Its function in the history of interpretation is therefore not simply to explain a diagram: it makes a legendary object serve as a warrant for the figures’ sacred prestige.

The river map is also paired with a second legendary revelation. A writing of similar character was said to have appeared on the back of a tortoise emerging from the Luo River and to have been shown to Great Yu while he drained floodwaters. The translator connects that tradition with the Great Plan in the Book of Documents, a text associated with the government of the kingdom. Together, the river map and the tortoise writing form a mythology of revealed patterns, but the translator separates this account from his explanation of how divination actually worked.

Divination and Interpretation

The Yellow River scheme was associated with numerical marks used to explain the construction of the figures, but the translator limits the role of numbers in the divinatory procedure. Forty-nine stalks were manipulated three times for each line, requiring eighteen manipulations to form a hexagram. Odd numbers produced strong, undivided lines and even numbers weak, divided ones; the resulting figure was interpreted through the hexagram judgments attributed to King Wen and the line statements attributed to the Duke of Zhou. Numbers helped produce the figure, rather than operating as independent principles that disclosed every possible event.

The book also sets limits on what a consultation was meant to establish. Divination was used to assess whether a contemplated plan or a particular set of circumstances would turn out well or badly, not to know future events absolutely. The translator contrasts this account with claims that the I Ching enabled its possessor to foretell everything that would happen, arguing that a careful reading does not support that sweeping prediction. The river-map legend belongs to the symbolic explanation of the figures; the consultation itself concerns the prospects of a proposed course of action.

The Crossing and Political History

In a separate historical reading, the recurring image of crossing a great stream is associated with the Yellow River as an obstacle the lords of Zhou had to cross in their revolutionary movement against the Shang and its tyrant. The translator points specifically to King Wu’s crossing in 1122 BC as one of China’s greatest historical deeds. Here the river is not a source of a supernatural diagram but a physical barrier within a political campaign.

The crossing’s significance depends on the waiting that precedes it. The hexagram discussed in the accompanying commentary teaches that strength confronted by danger should wait until success is assured rather than rush forward. The translator reads this pattern against King Wu’s campaign: the passage across the river followed a long interval of waiting for the moment when success could be expected. The river therefore gathers the entry’s two modes of meaning without collapsing them—the legendary landscape from which a sacred pattern supposedly emerged, and the dangerous passage through which a historical campaign advanced.