The Great Extreme produces the Two Forms

The Great Extreme produces the Two Forms is a cosmological formula explaining how the I Ching’s basic line patterns arise: the Great Extreme produces two elementary Forms, which generate four Emblematic Symbols and then the Eight Trigrams. The translator treats the sequence both as an influential account of the figures’ origin and as a theory whose most famous starting image does not withstand scrutiny. For him, the lines and their combinations provide a workable construction; the circle proposed to represent their source does not.

The Sequence of Formation

The formula presents a cascade: the Great Extreme produces the two Forms; those Forms produce four Symbols; and the Symbols produce eight Trigrams. The two Forms are a whole line and a divided line. Placing either line over either of the two produces the four possible paired configurations; adding each of the two fundamental lines in turn to those configurations yields the trigrams. The account then extends the same combinatorial process to the sixty-four hexagrams, each composed of six lines and treated in the I Ching’s text as the subject of an essay.

This generative scheme has a practical counterpart in the translator’s description of the divination procedure. Forty-nine stalks are manipulated three times for each line, requiring eighteen manipulations to form a hexagram. Odd and even numbers determine strong, undivided and weak, divided lines; the numbers 9, 8, 7, and 6 are assigned to the four Emblematic Symbols. Once the figure is formed, its interpretation comes from King Wen’s judgments on the hexagrams and the Duke of Zhou’s emblematic line statements. In this account, numbers help construct the figure; they do not constitute a metaphysical substance from which the world is made.

The Translator’s Critique of the Circle

The translator questions what the Great Extreme means and notes that the name does not occur elsewhere in the old Confucian literature. He suspects that the concept entered the appendix from a Daoist source in the fifth or perhaps fourth century BC. Zhu Xi, in his Lessons on the I for the Young, represents it as a circle, following the philosopher Zhou Dunyi, but cautions readers against attributing that diagram to Fuxi.

The translator finds the circle unsuccessful as an account of the lines’ formation. If it could unroll, he reasons, it would first produce one long line; dividing that line would yield two whole lines, not one whole and one divided. A further division of one of them would still be needed to arrive at the two forms used by the figures. The symbol therefore adds a problem rather than resolving one. Beginning instead with the whole and divided lines makes the construction straightforward: successive additions generate the four-line, five-line, and six-line figures, doubling the number of figures at each stage until there are sixty-four.

Formula, Divination, and Interpretation

The appendix links the trigrams to determining the good or bad outcomes of events and, through that determination, to the great business of life. The translator places this claim within a long history of divination in China. He points to references to tortoise-shell divination and stalk divination in early texts, while distinguishing the practice’s purpose from a claim to know the future absolutely: the consultation assessed whether contemplated plans and circumstances were likely to turn out well or badly.

He also separates the appendix’s belief in the divining materials from his own account of their operation. The appendix calls the tortoise and the plant spirit-like, as if they possessed a subtle virtue suited to divination. The translator reports that the stalks were necessary to the procedure, but rejects the idea that their numbers disclose a universal numerical order. He contrasts this limited instrumental role with the Pythagorean doctrine, as he understands it, in which Number is the principle and cause of things.

Lines, Meaning, and Later Philosophy

The formula’s language became part of a larger interpretive history, but the translator warns against reading later cosmology back into the appendix. He notes that yin and yang appear there alongside older terms for the line types, translated as strong and weak. Although commentators often treat yin and yang as active and inactive principles of a primary ethereal matter, he argues that the doctrine of primary matter developed much later, reaching fuller form in the Song dynasty. In his reading, the appendix concerns changing phenomena in nature and human experience, not a developed theory of creation.

That distinction parallels his account of translating the I Ching. Because Chinese characters, in his view, symbolize ideas rather than represent words, a strictly literal version cannot reliably convey the author’s thought. The translator’s task is to meet the scope of a sentence and render its meaning accurately, adding occasional words where English needs what the original leaves implicit. The Great Extreme formula thus remains both a compact statement about the generation of the figures and a point at which readers must distinguish the text’s line-making scheme from later speculative explanations of what lies behind it.