Bagua- Chinese ConceptConcept"The Eight Symbols"

The Dragon-Horse of the Yellow River

The Xici zhuan records how the sage-emperor Fuxi received the trigrams. A dragon-horse rose from the Yellow River bearing on its back the Hetu, the River Chart, a pattern of dots encoding the structure of the cosmos. Fuxi studied these markings alongside the patterns of the natural world: the tracks of beasts and the movements of the stars. From this synthesis of revelation and observation, he devised eight trigrams, each a stack of three lines, solid (yang) or broken (yin). Eight symbols for the primary forces: Heaven, Earth, Thunder, Water, Mountain, Wind, Fire, Lake. Together they mapped the interplay of yin and yang across all phenomena, not as fixed categories but as forces in constant motion, each becoming the others.

King Wen's Prison

The trigrams found their fullest expression in captivity. King Wen of Zhou, imprisoned by the last Shang tyrant, spent his confinement pairing the eight trigrams into sixty-four hexagrams: six-lined figures that could describe any situation and its trajectory of change. Each hexagram received a name and a judgment. His son, the Duke of Zhou, later added interpretive lines for each stage.

The result was the Yijing, the Book of Changes. Two arrangements of the trigrams survive: the Earlier Heaven sequence attributed to Fuxi, representing ideal cosmic order, and the Later Heaven sequence attributed to King Wen, representing the world as experienced.