Fuxi

Fuxi is the legendary ancient figure whom one account credits with devising the Eight Trigrams, the three-line figures that became the conceptual and structural basis of the I Ching. The book treats that origin story as influential but historically uncertain: it weighs a portrait of observation and classification against later claims that the figures arose from a supernatural map, and leaves unsettled whether Fuxi also multiplied the trigrams into the sixty-four hexagrams.

Identity and Traditional Attribution

The account identifies Pâo-hsî as another name for Fuxi and describes him as the most ancient personage mentioned with any definiteness in Chinese history, while acknowledging that much fabulous material surrounds him. It gives his chronological beginning as 3322 BC, but immediately qualifies the apparent precision: elsewhere the author doubts that Fuxi was a historical person at all. His importance here rests less on a secure biography than on the place assigned to him in competing explanations of the figures.

In the account quoted from the third Appendix, Fuxi surveys the patterns of the world in a sequence extending from sky to earth and from near to distant. He looks upward at the forms in the heavens, downward at patterns on earth, considers the markings of birds and beasts and the suitability of different soils, and reflects both on himself and on things generally. From these observations, the passage says, he devised eight three-line figures to display nature’s subtle operations and classify the qualities of the myriad things. The description makes the trigrams instruments of ordering and comparison: their beginnings lie in attending to differences across the natural world.

The Eight Trigrams and Their Meanings

The eight figures are named khien, tui, lî, kăn, sun, khân, kăn, and khwăn. The book associates them respectively with heaven or sky; water as a marsh or lake; fire, the sun, or lightning; thunder; wind and wood; water in forms such as rain, clouds, springs, streams in defiles, and the moon; a hill or mountain; and earth. Each figure is assigned an attribute suggested by the natural object it represents, although the author postpones discussion of those attributes.

This account does not claim that the figures’ later significance is self-evident. The text, as the book explains it, supplies no account of their origin or formation; King Wen takes up the hexagrams in his chosen sequence and interprets each figure as a whole, while the Duke of Zhou uses emblematic illustrations to interpret its individual lines. The interpretation of a whole figure is meant to accord with the combined meanings of those lines. Fuxi’s attributed invention therefore marks the beginning of the symbolic system, not the completion of the moral and political readings later attached to it.

Competing Accounts of Origin

A second account describes the figures more mechanically: strong and weak lines are combined to make the eight trigrams, and those trigrams are combined with one another to form the sixty-four hexagrams. The author regards this as the most plausible account of how the figures could have been generated, while remaining unable to identify who first carried out the multiplication. The common view assigns that step to King Wen; Zhu Xi, when asked, leaned instead toward the possibility that Fuxi had multiplied the trigrams himself. The author does not reject Zhu Xi’s possibility, but considers the names of the hexagrams as they are now known to date from King Wen.

A third origin story connects the trigrams with a map produced by the Yellow River. According to popular tradition, a dragon-horse emerged from the river bearing marks on its back, and Fuxi took the arrangement as a model for the eight figures. The book calls the story fabulous, yet examines it because the map tradition shaped later explanations of how the figures should be interpreted. The map was said to have survived at court into the eleventh century BC, then to have perished; after speculation resumed in the Han dynasty, its first public delineation appeared under the Song ruler Hui Zong, between 1101 and 1125. The author suspects that the map story was intended to confer supernatural character on the trigrams and encourage religious veneration, rather than to preserve a reliable account of their making.

Divination and the Limits of the Attribution

The figures attributed to Fuxi belong to a culture in which divination was already practiced. The book points to references to tortoise-shell divination in early classical materials and to the use of plant stalks alongside it; the stalk plant, Ptarmica Sibirica, was still cultivated around the grave of Confucius when the author visited. It presents Fuxi’s trigrams as an antecedent to a later procedure, not as proof that their legendary deviser himself used them in the form described by the divination manual.

That procedure employed forty-nine stalks, manipulated three times for each line, requiring eighteen manipulations to make a hexagram. Odd numbers produced strong, undivided lines and even numbers weak, divided ones; the numbers 9, 8, 7, and 6 were assigned to four emblematic symbols used in forming the figures. Once formed, a hexagram was interpreted through King Wen’s judgments and the Duke of Zhou’s emblematic line statements. In the author’s account, numbers help the operator produce a figure; they do not constitute an independent doctrine that numbers govern the material existence of things.

The purpose of consultation is also sharply limited. Divination was not, in this reading, a means of discovering future events absolutely, but a way to judge whether contemplated plans and conditions were likely to turn out well or badly. A passage on examining doubts even allows that when both the tortoise-shell and stalks oppose people’s views, stillness is auspicious and active undertakings unlucky. This distinction separates the later practical use of the figures from stronger claims that their combinations disclose every possible occurrence in advance.

Historical and Interpretive Significance

Fuxi’s place in the book is consequently both foundational and provisional. He personifies an origin in which close observation of natural patterns yields a compact system of symbolic forms, but the author does not treat the legendary biography or the supernatural map as established history. He also refuses to settle whether Fuxi, King Wen, or someone else expanded the trigrams into the full set of hexagrams. The uncertainty matters: the figures’ basic structure, their traditional attribution, and the later texts that interpret them are related but distinct questions.

The distinction extends to the meaning of the lines themselves. The book explains their operation through paired qualities—whole and divided, strong and weak—and through positions and correspondences within the hexagrams. Their significance varies with the name and subject of each figure; a line cannot be interpreted in isolation from the pattern it occupies. In this account, Fuxi supplies the legendary starting point for a system whose meaning is not fixed by its origin alone, but elaborated through the later interpretations associated with King Wen and the Duke of Zhou.