Sixty-four hexagrams

The Sixty-four hexagrams are the structured figures at the heart of the Yijing’s Text: sixty-four arrangements of six whole or divided lines, each the basis for a short, enigmatic essay on a moral, social, or political theme. Their importance lies not only in their combinatorial form but in the interpretive work built upon it: the whole figure establishes a situation, its lines differentiate roles and changing circumstances, and the resulting judgments became material for divination. The account emphasizes both the simplicity of the figures’ construction and the complexity of reading them as meaningful patterns.

Formation and Number

The account describes the Text as sixty-four short essays based on sixty-four figures, each made up of six lines, some whole and some divided. It presents the elementary Forms as a whole line and a divided line. Placing these lines over one another produces four emblematic two-line patterns; adding either line successively produces the eight trigrams. Repeating the operation yields sixteen four-line figures, then thirty-two five-line figures, and finally the sixty-four hexagrams.

This growth follows two different numerical patterns. The number of lines rises arithmetically, by one at each step, while the number of figures doubles: its progression is geometrical, with a common ratio of two. The account therefore treats the combinatorial process, rather than an elaborate hidden mechanism, as sufficient to explain the figures’ formation. The procedure could continue beyond six lines—to 128 seven-line figures, 256 eight-line figures, and more—but the account suggests that the growing mass would become cumbersome and impossible to handle in the same interpretive manner.

A shorter description begins directly with the eight trigrams: a strong and a weak line are manipulated to form them, and each trigram is then combined with itself and the others to produce the sixty-four. The account presents this as an efficient statement of the same basic operation, not as a different final structure. In the historical record it cites, the Official Book of the Zhou dynasty says that each of three systems of Changes had eight primary figures multiplied to sixty-four. The passage identifies the “Yî of Kâu” as the Text that survives, while noting that the other named systems, Lien-shan and Kweî-ȝhang, leave no surviving trace in the account’s description.

Competing Accounts of Origin

The account separates the practical formation of the figures from claims about their ultimate origin. It reports a tradition in which the Great Extreme produces the two elementary Forms, which produce four emblematic Symbols and then the eight trigrams. The whole and divided lines, the four paired patterns, and the eight trigrams can be displayed with confidence; what the Great Extreme itself means is less certain. The author argues that this expression entered an Appendix from a Taoist source in the fifth or fourth century BC, rather than offering a demonstrable account of how the figures were first devised.

A later circular representation of the Great Extreme is judged unsuccessful as an explanation of the line-making process. If a circle were imagined to unroll into one line, further division would still be needed to produce the whole and divided lines. Starting instead from those two lines, the repeated combination of patterns explains the progression to the complete set without that difficulty. The account thus distinguishes a visible, repeatable procedure from a cosmological interpretation imposed upon it.

Who first extended the trigrams into sixty-four figures remains disputed. The more common view attributed the multiplication to King Wen; Zhu Xi, when asked, leaned toward the possibility that Fuxi had done it. The account declines to settle that disagreement but argues that the names in their present form belong to King Wen. It likewise regards the story of a diagram on a dragon-horse from the Yellow River as an effort to give the trigrams supernatural authority and religious veneration, while questioning whether the transmitted form of the scheme is historically correct. These explanations therefore remain distinct: a traditional attribution, an unresolved question about the figures’ multiplication, and the author’s account of how the combinations themselves can be generated.

Reading the Figures and Their Lines

The account’s model of interpretation begins with the hexagram as a whole. King Wen takes up the figures in an order of his own, apparently guided by contrasts between successive pairs, and gives each figure an overall significance, sometimes indicating what action its circumstances call for and whether that action is auspicious. The Duke of Zhou then interprets each of the six lines, beginning at the bottom, through a symbolic or emblematic illustration and a judgment about the fortune of action associated with it. The account says the king’s reading of the whole is meant to accord with the combined significance of the six line interpretations.

Position modifies what a line means. The first and fourth, second and fifth, and third and sixth places form corresponding pairs; a complete correspondence calls for lines of different qualities, one whole and one divided. The second and fifth places are especially important because they are the middle lines of their respective trigrams. When a whole line in one of these central positions corresponds with a divided line in the other, their relation is complete. The fifth may represent a sovereign or commander, while the second may represent a capable minister or officer; their appropriately matched action can be beneficial. These rules do not give each line a meaning independent of its context: the hexagram’s name and the situation it denotes affect how the lines are applied.

The account also describes the first, third, and fifth places as correct for whole lines, and the second, fourth, and sixth as correct for divided lines. Whole lines signify strength, and divided lines weakness; in the account’s general scheme, strength commands and weakness obeys. Yet position and correspondence qualify this broad distinction. Interpretation depends on the combined evidence of line quality, place, relation to other lines, and the subject named by the hexagram, rather than on a single symbol read in isolation.

Text, Divination, and Political Meaning

The Text is described as written in the manner of diviners, but the account distinguishes its authors’ work from a live act of divination. King Wen and his son were familiar with a longstanding divinatory practice and wrote in its compressed, symbolic style; they were not themselves consulting the figures for immediate answers. Later users treated their words as oracles, consulting the hexagrams to consider how events might go and whether to continue or withdraw from intended courses of action.

The seventh hexagram, Hosts, shows how a figure’s name, structure, and line judgments can be read together as a political argument. The account associates it with the assembled population of a feudal state, whose people could become its army when required. Its one whole line lies centrally in the lower trigram, a position treated as the figure’s governing place and therefore as that of the host’s leader; the remaining lines represent those expected to follow or obey him. A line judgment about birds in the fields is interpreted as permitting the destruction of plunderers and invaders, and as restricting legitimate war to defense or the rightful suppression of rebellion and lawlessness. The account further contrasts the oldest son, entrusted with command, with younger men whose sharing of authority would bring harm. On the top line, appointments go to those who have distinguished themselves, while unworthy men are excluded from office. The example makes military command, political legitimacy, and the distribution of responsibility consequences of reading the whole figure and its lines together.

The same method frames the account’s reading of Great Havings: its opening judgment promises great progress and success, while its first line warns that recognizing the difficulty and danger of a position is necessary to avoid error. Its second line depicts a large wagon carrying a load and says that advance in any direction need not be mistaken. Elsewhere, the account reads Breakthrough through a seasonal and political contrast: the last cold and dark line is about to give way to warmer, brighter days, while a powerful bad official supports a corrupt government or an old dynasty. The problem is how to remove such a figure; the proposed means depends more on character and broad sympathy than on arms alone. Across these examples, the hexagrams do not function merely as diagrams: they organize judgments about timing, authority, responsibility, and action.

Translation and Interpretive Limits

The translator’s account of the figures is inseparable from a problem of language. His first English version, made in 1854, tried to preserve the original’s concision. The result was a string of English words with little syntactical connection, following the example of the Latin version by P. Regis and his collaborators; both versions, he acknowledges, were nearly unintelligible. He concluded that a literal rendering could not solve the problem because Chinese written characters, in his view, symbolized ideas rather than representing words, and their combination reflected thought rather than a sentence’s explicit verbal form.

His proposed alternative is to let the symbolic characters bring the translator’s mind into relation with the author’s thought, and then express that thought as clearly and accurately as possible in the target language. This is not, he cautions, permission to invent freely: the translator should render the original’s meaning as exactly and concisely as possible, adding occasional words only to express what the writer’s thought supplies implicitly. In his edition, such additions were generally enclosed in parentheses. He invokes the principle that a reader must use thought to meet the scope of a sentence, describing interpretation as an effort of mind to mind rather than a mechanical substitution of words.

The need for interpretation does not erase uncertainty. The account acknowledges that some readings of the hexagrams may strike readers as “much ado about nothing,” while refusing to assign that difficulty automatically to the translator. It also notes that explaining the Text required a running commentary, since readers needed to see how the judgments attributed to King Wen and his son were drawn from figures and lines. Space constraints prevented the planned translations of material by Zhu Xi and other Song writers; moreover, the translator distinguished the Song philosophy, which he considered more Taoist than Confucian, from the Yijing proper, locating its development especially in the Appendixes. The hexagrams consequently stand between a terse textual form, a layered interpretive practice, and later philosophical readings that the account insists should not be projected uncritically onto the earliest material.