Fuxi and the trigrams

Fuxi and the trigrams are linked in the Yijing’s origin traditions as creator and created figures, but the relationship is not presented as settled history. One account portrays Fuxi deriving eight three-line symbols from patterns in nature; another makes the trigrams part of a systematic process of combining strong and weak lines. The translator favors that second explanation, while treating the supernatural story of the River Map as a later attempt to lend the figures sacred authority.

The traditional account

The Great Treatise describes Pao-hsi, identified by the translator with Fuxi, as observing the world in several directions: he looked up at the forms in the sky and down at the patterns on earth, noted the markings of birds and beasts and the suitability of different soils, and considered both what was near at hand in his own person and what lay at a distance. From these observations, he devised eight three-line figures, intended to display the operations of nature and classify the qualities of the myriad things.

The translator places Fuxi at the beginning of Chinese chronology, while emphasizing that much fabulous material surrounds him and expressing doubt about his historical personality. The account describes the trigrams’ alleged sources and purposes only in vague, general terms; it does not explain how particular observations became particular figures. Fuxi’s status as their deviser is therefore a claim made by an origin tradition, not a demonstrated account of how the symbols were formed.

The eight figures represent different natural phenomena: heaven or sky; water as marsh or lake; fire, the sun, or lightning; thunder; wind and wood; water as rain, clouds, springs, streams in defiles, or the moon; a hill or mountain; and the earth. Each is also assigned an attribute suggested by its natural referent. In this account, the trigrams are not merely pictures of isolated objects: they organize the qualities of the world into a set of symbolic forms.

From trigrams to hexagrams

The text distinguishes the traditional attribution of the eight trigrams to Fuxi from the unresolved question of who combined the figures to make the sixty-four hexagrams. A passage describes strong and weak lines being combined to form the eight trigrams, after which each trigram was joined with itself and with the others. The translator reports that the more common view credits King Wen with multiplying the trigrams, while Zhu Xi leaned toward the view that Fuxi had done so himself. The translator does not venture to reject Zhu Xi’s opinion about the multiplication, but argues that the hexagram names as they have come down were King Wen’s.

The account thus leaves the authorship of the expanded figure-system open while separating it from the naming and interpretation of the hexagrams. In the translator’s description, King Wen took the figures in an order of his own, explained each hexagram as a whole, and indicated possible action and its fortune; the Duke of Zhou then interpreted its six lines one by one through symbolic illustrations. The relation between Fuxi and the trigrams belongs to the account of the figures’ earliest formation, not to the later work of assigning the hexagrams their received names and textual meanings.

Rival explanations of origin

A further tradition connects the trigrams with the River Map. According to popular belief, a map issued from the Yellow River and supplied Fuxi with a model for making the eight figures; a related story says that a dragon-horse emerged from the river bearing marks on its back. The translator calls this account fabulous and says that its importance for his discussion lies in the interpretive rules associated with the map, rather than in its credibility as history. He suggests that the story’s purpose was to give the trigrams a supernatural character and inspire religious veneration. The map itself, he notes, was said to have been preserved in the eleventh century BC, later perished, and was not publicly delineated until the Song dynasty.

Against both the observational story and the River Map tradition, the translator considers a structural explanation more persuasive: begin with whole and divided lines, then manipulate and combine them into the figures. He describes this as the second account of their origin and regards it as the true one. Its strength, in his view, is that it explains how a small set of elementary forms can generate the lineal figures without requiring a supernatural model. His judgment does not erase the traditional attribution to Fuxi; it separates that attribution from what he considers a more plausible account of the figures’ construction.

Divination and interpretation

The trigrams’ later significance rests partly on their use in divination. The translator says that divination with trigrams had long been practiced, and that Fuxi’s figures became the basis of the sixty-four hexagrams used in the Yijing. But he distinguishes the figures’ formation from the work of divining with them: the figures alone do not constitute a complete procedure. Diviners manipulated stalks to form hexagrams and then consulted King Wen’s judgments and the Duke of Zhou’s line statements for interpretation.

The divination procedure used forty-nine stalks, manipulated three times for each line, requiring eighteen manipulations to form a hexagram. Odd numbers produced strong, undivided lines and even numbers weak, divided ones; the numbers 9, 8, 7, and 6 also played a part in combining the lines. In the translator’s account, numbers served as aids to making the figures, not as independent entities or a hidden doctrine that disclosed all possible events. Divination was intended to assess whether a contemplated plan or set of circumstances would turn out favorably or unfavorably, rather than to reveal the future absolutely.

Limits of the attribution

The translator’s account keeps several layers distinct: the tradition that Fuxi devised the trigrams, the disputed question of who expanded them into hexagrams, the legendary River Map story, and the later practices of divination and textual interpretation. It also resists reading the trigrams as proof of a fully developed cosmology. In his analysis, the Yijing’s discussion concerns changing phenomena in nature and human experience; the more elaborate doctrine of primary matter, he argues, took shape much later and should not be projected backward onto the text.

The result is a qualified account of Fuxi’s place in the tradition. He remains the figure to whom the eight trigrams are conventionally attributed, and the natural-world survey gives that attribution an intelligible symbolic logic. Yet the book does not establish the historical mechanics of his invention, and the translator prefers a practical construction from whole and divided lines to either an unexamined legend or a supernatural origin story. The relation is therefore both foundational and contested: Fuxi anchors the received story of the trigrams, while the figures’ construction, expansion, and use belong to distinct stages of explanation.