He Tu

The Ho Map is a traditional diagram associated with the origin and interpretation of the lineal figures of the I Ching. In the account examined here, a dragon-horse emerges from the Yellow River carrying a pattern from which Fuxi is said to have devised the Eight Trigrams; later interpreters connect the pattern’s numbered marks with the distinction between whole and divided lines. The translator recounts this influential tradition while explicitly doubting its historical reliability, making the map both an origin story and a lens through which later systems of interpretation can be described.

The River tradition

A passage in the Great Treatise says that Heaven and Earth undergo changes and transformations, which the sages imitated through the I Ching; it then states that the Yellow River produced the Map and the Luo produced the Writing. The translator singles out the River Map because tradition and popular belief treated it as a model used by Fuxi in making the Eight Trigrams. He also notes that Confucius believed in such a map, or at least spoke as if he did, and that the Record of Rites says the map was borne by a horse.

The more vivid version of the tradition identifies the bearer as a dragon-horse emerging from the Yellow River with an arrangement of marks on its back. Fuxi is said to have taken the idea of the trigrams from this design. The map is thus presented not simply as an image but as a bridge between an extraordinary appearance in the natural world and the ordered signs used to represent change.

A tradition with a recorded history

The translator distinguishes the story’s long cultural standing from the later history of its surviving representation. He reports that the map was preserved at court in the eleventh century BC, but afterwards perished. Speculation about its form resumed when ancient classics were restored in the Han dynasty; nevertheless, the first public delineation of the map came much later, during the reign of Hui Zung of the Song dynasty, dated 1101–1125.

That gap matters to the account. The familiar diagram cannot simply be treated as a securely transmitted image of the object supposedly kept at court. The translator says that the now-approved scheme is a later reconstruction and questions whether it accurately represents the arrangement as it existed in the Zhou dynasty. Its use in explaining ancient line symbolism therefore comes with an explicit qualification: the diagram is historically influential, but its exact original form is uncertain.

Marks, numbers, and lines

In the later scheme described by the translator, the marks are small circles, divided nearly equally between light and dark. The odd-numbered circles—one, three, five, seven, and nine—are light; the even-numbered circles—two, four, six, eight, and ten—are dark. The arrangement is offered as an origin for the account of the numbers of Heaven and Earth in the Great Treatise. The difference between light and dark also supplies a visible model for yang and yin, understood here as bright and dark, or sun-like and moon-like.

The line figures translate that contrast into another form: a whole line stands for the bright circle, while a divided line stands for the dark one. In the translator’s explanation, this is the practical connection between the map’s marks and the hexagrams’ visible structure. The account further associates odd and even numbers with the signs of Fuxi’s trigrams and discusses the use of six and nine as numbers for divided and undivided lines in the manipulation of divining stalks. But the translator cautions that the late delineation of the map makes the map-based derivation of these numerical assignments uncertain, even if the numbers associated with the figures themselves may have been fixed early.

The map’s interpretive importance also depends on the relations among lines, not only on their individual qualities. The first, third, and fifth positions are treated as correct when occupied by whole lines; the second, fourth, and sixth when occupied by divided lines. Pairs in corresponding positions—the first and fourth, second and fifth, and third and sixth—are considered in relation to one another, with a complete correlation requiring unlike qualities. The second and fifth lines have particular force as the middle positions of their respective trigrams. When their qualities correspond, the image may represent a beneficial relationship such as that between a sovereign or commander and a capable minister or officer. The meaning of a line consequently depends on the named hexagram and the condition it represents, rather than on a fixed meaning detached from context.

Legend and critical interpretation

The translator calls the account of a supernatural map so evidently fabulous that detailed treatment might seem a waste of time. He explains why he nevertheless examines it: the map provides an opportunity to set out the rules used to interpret the figures. His position separates two questions that the legend tends to join—the historical truth of the map’s miraculous appearance and the interpretive usefulness of the pattern later attributed to it.

He judges a different account of how the trigrams and hexagrams arose to be more likely. In his view, once whole and divided lines had been conceived, manipulating them could generate the lineal figures without requiring the map as their historical source. He suggests that the River Map story may instead have been devised to give the trigrams a supernatural character and encourage religious veneration. The map remains consequential, then, not because its legendary origin is accepted, but because its diagrammatic scheme became a means of explaining the figures, their number patterns, and the rules by which their lines acquire meaning.