易經, the Book of Changes
The Yijing
One of the oldest Chinese classics, a divination manual that became a classic of cosmology.
The building blocks
Lines, trigrams, hexagrams
Each line is yang, unbroken, or yin, broken. Three lines make one of eight trigrams, 八卦; two trigrams stacked make one of sixty-four hexagrams. The Great Treatise gives the cascade: the Supreme Ultimate, 太極, produces yin and yang, which produce the four images, 四象, which produce the eight trigrams, which pair into the sixty-four hexagrams.
The eight trigrams
In the Later Heaven order
- 乾 qián, Heaven, northwest, Metal. 兌 duì, Lake, west, Metal.
- 離 lí, Fire, south, Fire. 震 zhèn, Thunder, east, Wood.
- 巽 xùn, Wind, southeast, Wood. 坎 kǎn, Water, north, Water.
- 艮 gèn, Mountain, northeast, Earth. 坤 kūn, Earth, southwest, Earth.
This Later Heaven arrangement is the one built into the feng shui compass, so the trigrams are the eight directions. Tradition credits the trigrams to Fuxi, 伏羲, and the texts to King Wen, 文王; history places the divination core in the early Zhou and the commentaries much later.
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