Trigrams

Meaning

A trigram, guà, is a figure of three lines stacked from the bottom up, each whole or broken. A whole line is yang, a broken one yin: two kinds of line in three places make eight figures, the bāguà, and no more. Each has a name, an image in nature and a quality. Qian ☰, three whole lines, is heaven and strength; Kun ☷, three broken ones, is earth and receptivity; between them stand Zhen ☳ thunder, Kan ☵ water, Gen ☶ the mountain, Xun ☴ wind, Li ☲ fire and Dui ☱ the lake.

The tradition reads them as a family. Qian and Kun are the father and the mother. The three trigrams with a single yang line are their sons, Zhen the eldest, Kan the middle, Gen the youngest, as the yang line climbs from the bottom to the top; the three with a single yin line are their daughters, Xun, Li and Dui, in the same order. Read round the compass, they are also the year turning: Zhen in the east at spring, Li in the south at midsummer, Dui in the west at autumn, Kan in the north at midwinter, and the four others in the corners between the seasons.

Doubled, the eight make the 64 hexagrams of the Book of Changes, every pair of trigrams once, one above the other. Set round the compass, they make the eight directions of Feng Shui, each with its trigram, its phase and its number of the Lo Shu. No trigram is better than another: each is one of the ways change shows itself, and the Book of Changes reads the eight together, each needing the others, as the lines of yin and yang need each other.

In practice

• The Kua number: a person’s Kua is a trigram, Kan for 1, Kun for 2 and so round the Lo Shu’s numbers, a 5 taking Kun or Gen by the count. Its group, East (Kan, Li, Zhen, Xun) or West (Qian, Kun, Gen, Dui), gives the four supportive directions.
• The Eight Mansions: each direction is read by how its trigram differs from yours, line by line, which is why the bond between two trigrams reads the same both ways.
• The home: a house is named by the trigram of the direction it sits in, so a home sitting north and facing south is a Kan house, and belongs to the East group.
• The Flying Stars: each outer palace of the Lo Shu is a trigram’s, and each star but the 5 has its trigram at home, the 1 White in Kan, the 9 Purple in Li; a palace’s reading offers its trigram in the encyclopedia.
• The 24 mountains: four of them are the corner trigrams themselves, Gen, Xun, Kun and Qian, each the middle mountain of its corner of the compass.

Across traditions

• In Human Design the 64 gates are the hexagrams of the Book of Changes, each an upper and a lower trigram: Gate 1 is Qian doubled, Gate 2 Kun doubled, and each gate’s page draws its two trigrams.
• In Korea the national flag sets four of them round the yin and yang circle: Qian, Kun, Kan and Li, heaven, earth, water and fire.
• In Europe Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, sent the Fu Xi arrangement by the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet, saw his binary numbers in it and said so in 1703: a whole line as 1, a broken one as 0, the eight trigrams count from 0 to 7.
• Beside the elements Western astrology divides the world in four, the Chinese phases in five, the trigrams in eight: three ways of seeing, each with its own logic, to be set side by side rather than merged.

Origin and history

Legend gives the trigrams to Fu Xi, who, the Great Commentary of the Book of Changes says, looked up at the patterns of heaven and down at those of the earth and drew the eight figures to understand them. The Zhou Yi, whose oldest layer goes back to the early first millennium BC, is built on the 64 hexagrams; its later commentaries, the Ten Wings, written between the Warring States and the Han, explain the trigrams themselves. The Discussion of the Trigrams gives each its image, its quality, its animal, its part of the body and its place in the family.

Two arrangements set them round a circle. The Early Heaven order, which the Song scholars traced to Fu Xi, sets opposites face to face: Qian in the south, Kun in the north, Li in the east, Kan in the west. The Later Heaven order, traced to King Wen, follows the fifth chapter of the Discussion, the year moving from Zhen in the east round to Gen in the north-east. Shao Yong in the 11th century and Zhu Xi in the 12th drew both as diagrams, and Feng Shui’s compass schools read the directions by the Later Heaven order.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune keeps the eight trigrams in the Later Heaven order, each with its three lines from the bottom up, its image, its phase, its direction, its group and its Kua, the Lo Shu number of its palace: Kan 1, Kun 2, Zhen 3, Xun 4, Qian 6, Dui 7, Gen 8, Li 9. It draws them from their lines rather than leaving them to a font, which may show ☰ to ☷ too small or not at all.

The Eight Mansions’ table follows from the lines. Set a direction’s trigram beside your own: the same trigram is Fu Wei; only the top line different is Sheng Qi; all three different, Yan Nian; the two lower lines, Tian Yi; the bottom line alone, Huo Hai; the two upper lines, Wu Gui; the top and bottom lines, Liu Sha; the middle line alone, Jue Ming. The four trigrams of a group differ from each other in the first four ways, never in the last four.

Correspondences