Luoshu

The Lo Writing is a legendary diagram associated with the River Lo and the origins of the Changes. In the account examined here, it appeared on a tortoise that emerged from the river and showed the pattern to Great Yu; the pattern was said to inspire the Great Plan, a model for governing the kingdom. The translator presents the tradition as a useful clue to the history of interpretation, not as an established supernatural origin: in its accepted numerical form, the diagram is the familiar arrangement of the numbers one through nine that totals fifteen in every direction.

The River Lo tradition

The account appears alongside a broader explanation in which Heaven produces spirit-like objects, including the tortoise and the divining plant, while sages use them and imitate the changes of Heaven and Earth through the Changes. Heaven’s visible patterns are treated as signs from which good and bad fortune may be discerned. In this setting, the Yellow River gives forth a Map and the River Lo gives forth a Writing: paired revelations that tradition connects to the formation of the lineal figures and to divination.

The specific legend assigns the Lo Writing to a tortoise emerging from the River Lo. Its marks were shown to Great Yu while he was engaged in draining the floodwaters, an episode associated with his celebrated flood-control work. The pattern then suggested the Great Plan, a mystical document in the Classic of History described as encompassing physics, astrology, divination, morals, politics, and religion, and as a major model for governing the realm. The story thus links a material sign borne by an animal to both cosmological interpretation and practical statecraft.

A diagram made numerical

The translator reproduces the accepted arrangement as three rows: 4, 9, 2; 3, 5, 7; and 8, 1, 6. Replacing the marks with numbers makes the pattern’s operation plain: the numbers from one to nine can be added in every direction to make fifteen. Rather than treating this arithmetic property as evidence of a miraculous revelation, he compares the arrangement to a magic square and suggests that the original River Map, if it could be recovered, might prove no more supernatural or difficult than this numerical puzzle.

That comparison changes the diagram’s role in the discussion. The tradition lends sacred authority to the trigrams by associating their source with extraordinary signs, but the translator says this account was evidently devised to give the figures a supernatural character and inspire religious veneration. He questions whether the received form of the pattern accurately preserves what existed in the Zhou dynasty. The Lo Writing therefore serves at once as a legendary explanation and as an example of how later accounts can make a system of signs appear divinely authorized.

Relation to the trigrams and the Great Plan

The Lo Writing is paired with the Yellow River Map, which popular tradition says supplied the model for Fuxi’s Eight Trigrams. The translator notes that the Changes itself mentions the River Map and the Lo Writing, and that the tradition about a map borne by a horse also appears in the Record of Rites. A court record is said to have mentioned the object among curiosities in 1079 BC. These references support the existence of an old tradition about the diagrams; they do not, in the translator’s account, verify the later story of the dragon-horse or establish that the Lo pattern generated the trigrams.

The Lo Writing’s other principal association is with Great Yu’s Great Plan. The flood-control setting gives the diagram a place in an account of political order: a pattern disclosed during the work of managing waters becomes the stimulus for a comprehensive plan of government. The translator identifies the plan as an important but mystical text and reports its broad range of subjects, while distinguishing the claim that the diagram inspired it from a demonstrated historical explanation.

The translator’s use and historical setting

The translator admits that the origin story is so evidently fabulous that detailed treatment might seem a waste of time. He nevertheless discusses it because he wants to use the diagram to explain rules for interpreting lineal figures. Its value in the introduction is therefore methodological: even a legendary object can help clarify the system of interpretation that the translator considers necessary, without requiring him to accept the legend as literal history.

That distinction matches his broader account of the Changes. He argues that the text’s lineal figures and the explanations attached to them must be read in their historical layers rather than collapsed into a single account. In his chronology, the main Text is associated with King Wen and the Duke of Zhou in the twelfth century BC, while the Appendixes arose at least six or seven centuries later. He warns that editions which intermix the Appendixes with the Text can confuse readers by blending ideas from different periods. The Lo Writing belongs to the later explanatory tradition he scrutinizes: it illuminates the history of how readers grounded the figures in a cosmic scheme, but does not settle the figures’ original formation.

The translator’s critical position is explicit. He favors a different account of how the trigrams and hexagrams arose, beginning with whole and divided lines and deriving the figures by manipulating them. By contrast, he treats the River Map and Lo Writing as traditions whose purpose was to impart supernatural standing to the system. His reading keeps the diagram in view without confusing symbolic authority with proof: the Lo Writing is important as a story of interpretation, as a bridge between divination and government, and as a numerical figure whose familiar structure invites analysis rather than credulous acceptance.