I’ve been working on a post on the trigram kun, earth, as inner trigram. That one will come soon – this is just something I wondered about along the way.
I started going through the sequence of hexagrams, looking at the Image texts for the ones with earth inside…
‘Above earth is the stream. Seeking Union.
The ancient kings founded countless cities for relationships with all the feudal lords.’‘Thunder bursts forth from the earth. Enthusiasm
The ancient kings composed music to honour virtue,
They celebrated and worshipped the supreme lord,
Joining with their ancestors.’‘Wind moves over the earth. Seeing.
The ancient kings studied the regions,
Saw the people,
And established their teachings.’
I’d got about this far when I was distracted by the ancient kings: there seemed to be a great many of them about. Was this a pattern, or a coincidence?
Well… there are seven hexagrams that mention the ancient kings in their Image text: 8, 16, 20, 21, 24, 25 and 59. Of these, three have kun as their inner trigram, and then there’s also 24 with kun as outer trigram. If the distribution were random, I don’t think you’d expect to see it more than a couple of times overall, and once as inner trigram.
So are the ancient kings especially like earth? Mothers to their people?
Perhaps. But this is only half the picture: the trigram zhen, thunder, also appears three times as inner trigram and once as outer trigram in ‘their’ hexagrams. The ancient kings are also innovators, the inner impulse that set civilisation in motion.
The arrangement of earth and thunder through these seven hexagrams is oddly symmetrical, look:
Here they all are, ignoring the actual distances between them in the sequence. (What is Hexagram 59 doing out there on a limb?)
And here’s the character wang, king:
王
It’s been written much like this since early times: three horizontal strokes joined by a single vertical one through the centre.
(Not for the first time, I feel as though I’m catching on v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y…)
Beautiful!