Fû-hsî

Fû-hsî appears less as a securely recoverable historical character than as a traditional name attached to the origins of the trigrams. The account uses him to distinguish the inherited figure-system from the later meanings assigned to it, while openly questioning both his historical existence and the explanations built around his supposed designs.

Identity and Historical Uncertainty

The author declines to place the beginnings of divination confidently in Fû-hsî’s time, explicitly saying that doubts about his historical personality cannot be suppressed. Divination by tortoise shell is attested in a document of the Shû King purporting to date to the twenty-third century BC; later evidence also records divination by line figures, formed through the manipulation of plant stalks. This discussion establishes an early history for the practice without treating the traditional attribution to Fû-hsî as proven.

Fû-hsî nevertheless serves as a point of reference for the trigram system. The book describes the whole line as a symbol of strength and authority and the broken line as weakness and submission, but the author says he can only dimly understand why those forms were adopted and cannot follow Fû-hsî in the formation of the trigrams. The distinction is important: the line figures are available for study, while their attributed origin and underlying rationale remain uncertain.

The Trigrams and Later Symbolic Readings

The account repeatedly separates the figures themselves from interpretations laid upon them. In discussing the hexagram Influence, it reports a reading based on the trigrams attributed to Fû-hsî: one represents the youngest son and the other the youngest daughter, whose union is used to explain the influence between husband and wife. The author presents the explanation as doubtful rather than established, and rejects the claim that this later trigram symbolism can simply be followed back to Fû-hsî.

A similar caution appears in the treatment of Gradual Development. One attempted explanation says that the original trigrams were Earth and Heaven, but that lines changed places to produce the figures associated with the youngest son and eldest daughter. The author calls this account a confused collection of claims and says it does not explain the hexagram’s idea of gradual advance. Another explanation points to correctly placed lines as steps ascending through the figure, but the author finds that argument unconvincing too. The hexagram’s meaning, he concludes, is attached to it by King Wen for reasons that cannot now be recovered; the trigram story does not settle the matter.

Divination as Practice

The trigrams belong to a practical history of divination, not only to later speculation about origins. An early reference to divining stalks occurs in the Shû account of the Counsels of the Great Yu, while the Great Plan describes consulting tortoise shell and stalks when examining doubts. The author also points to stalks of Ptarmica Sibirica, cultivated around Confucius’s grave, as the plant used in the line-figure procedure.

The book distinguishes the purpose of a consultation from a claim to know the future absolutely. Divination was used to judge whether contemplated plans and circumstances were likely to turn out well or badly. The author warns that the language of the Appendix can mislead a cursory reader into thinking that the I Ching promises advance knowledge of all future events. He cites a passage on examining doubts in which, when both tortoise shell and stalks oppose human views, stillness is fortunate and active measures are unlucky.

The procedure described in the Appendix used forty-nine stalks. Each line required three manipulations, so forming a hexagram took eighteen; odd numbers yielded strong, undivided lines and even numbers weak, divided ones. The emblematic numbers 9, 8, 7, and 6 helped combine the lines into figures. Once the figure had been made, the operator turned to King Wen’s judgments and the Duke of Zhou’s line statements for interpretation. In the author’s account, numbers served as instruments for constructing the hexagram, not as independent entities or the cause of things.

Limits of the Attribution

The author contrasts the Appendix’s reverent description of the tortoise and stalks as spirit-like with skeptical views that regard them as an old shell and withered twigs. He judges the Appendix’s belief in their subtle divinatory virtue to be credulous, and concludes that divination itself is futile. His criticism is directed not only at the attributed antiquity of the practice but also at later claims that its numerical system contains an unfathomable science.

Fû-hsî’s place in the account is therefore deliberately limited. The trigrams associated with his name belong to an old and consequential system, but neither the historical personality nor the explanations of how the figures acquired their meanings are treated as certain. By keeping traditional attribution, observable procedure, and later symbolic interpretation apart, the author presents Fû-hsî as a disputed origin-point rather than a fully knowable founder.