King Wen arrangement of the trigrams

The King Wen arrangement of the trigrams is a reordering of the eight trigrams attributed to King Wen, in which none retains the compass position it held in the earlier scheme. It became an interpretive framework for relating the trigrams to one another and to the seasonal course of nature, but the book treats its authorship and purpose as historical questions rather than settled facts.

The Arrangement and Its Attribution

The book presents the arrangement as distinct from an older plan: King Wen altered the trigrams’ positions so that not one stood at the same compass point as before. A plate identifies the scheme by relating the trigrams to the cardinal and other points, making spatial order part of the interpretive apparatus rather than merely a list of symbols.

The arrangement also assigns the trigrams relations to one another, as though they formed a family of parents and children. The author describes this as a system associated with King Wen, while questioning whether it can actually be traced to him. The family language, in the author’s view, did not belong to the earliest antiquity: it arose in Middle Antiquity, was known by the period of the Appendixes, and neither displaced the older nomenclature nor became universal.

Natural Cycles and Interpretive Use

One account in the Appendixes uses the arrangement to describe divine activity through the trigrams over the course of the year. Its sequence evokes the springing, growth, and maturity of vegetation, from spring’s labours to winter’s cessation of work. In this reading, the arrangement provides a pattern through which natural processes can be narrated as movement across the trigrams, with God acting through nature’s successive transformations.

The book distinguishes this seasonal exposition from a secure historical explanation of why the arrangement was made. It reports that Philippe Grégoire Regis adopted the view that King Wen deliberately changed the earlier order to symbolize the kingdom’s disorganization and disorder. The author rejects the confidence of that explanation: the text does not say why the change was made, and the relevant Appendix instead suggests that the arrangement served the immediate purpose of presenting the yearly development of the vegetable world.

The Arrangement in Divination

The trigrams belonged to a long-established practice of divination. The book points to early references to consulting the tortoise shell and stalks, and to the use of stalks to manipulate lineal figures. King Wen, as a ruler familiar with divination, would have known the practice; the author presents the suggestion that study of the figures might also have appeared innocuous to his suspicious captor as a possibility, not an established fact.

In the procedure described by the Appendix, forty-nine stalks are manipulated three times for each line; forming a six-line hexagram therefore requires eighteen manipulations. Odd and even numbers determine strong, undivided and weak, divided lines, while the numbers 9, 8, 7, and 6 are assigned to four emblematic symbols used in forming the figures. Once the hexagram is formed, interpretation turns to King Wen’s hexagram statements and the Duke of Zhou’s line statements. In the author’s account, numbers help produce the figure; they do not operate as an independent science that reveals all things.

The purpose of this divination is likewise limited. It is used to judge whether plans or contemplated circumstances are likely to turn out well or badly, not to establish future events absolutely. The author argues that claims that the numerical system makes every possible occurrence knowable misread the Appendix, whose language about foreknowledge can mislead a cursory reader. The distinction between the arrangement as a symbolic structure and divination as a procedure is central to the book’s treatment: the diagram organizes interpretation, while stalk manipulation generates the figure to be interpreted.

Historical Limits and Legacy

The account repeatedly marks the gap between attribution and proof. The arrangement is ascribed to King Wen, but the author says it is difficult to know why a ruler more than three thousand years earlier altered the compass positions when he left no explanation. The family correspondences, too, are presented as later developments rather than unquestionable features of the earliest system. The arrangement is therefore historically influential without being transparently recoverable in origin or intention.

Its interpretation also depends on distinguishing the older Text from the later Appendixes. The book dates the Text associated with King Wen and the Duke of Zhou centuries before the Appendixes, which it places in the Confucian period, probably between 450 and 350 BC. In the author’s view, treating these strata as one homogeneous work obscures differences in their explanations of the figures. The common editions’ practice of printing several Appendixes alongside the Text further compounded that confusion; the imperial Khang-hsî edition, by contrast, printed the two separately.

The scheme’s survival and authority were shaped by later transmission. The I Ching escaped the Qin book burning of 213 BC because divination was among the exempted subjects. By the beginning of the Common Era, a library catalogue listed works on the I Ching and its Appendixes from thirteen authors or schools, comprising 294 portions; the 1715 imperial edition drew on commentaries by 218 scholars. This accumulated scholarship preserved and elaborated the arrangement’s interpretations, even as the book insists that commentary, inherited attribution, and historical evidence are not the same thing.