About the King Wen sequence

[Marcip]

Hello to all I-Ching practitioners.
I'm trying to solve the mystery of the sequence... ok, I know it's impossible, but I like working on this project, and it changed my thinking completely over the years.
Here comes my question:
We know that the sequence is somehow connected to the Later Heaven bagua, but can we prove this connection? Or it's just the tradition?
Thanks in advance.

 

[bradford]

I gave up on it permanently, so now all I have to do is scoff at it.
Ever a big fan of the Xian Tian, though.

 

[svenrus]

Hello to all I-Ching practitioners.
I'm trying to solve the mystery of the sequence... ok, I know it's impossible, but I like working on this project, and it changed my thinking completely over the years.
Here comes my question:
We know that the sequence is somehow connected to the Later Heaven bagua, but can we prove this connection? Or it's just the tradition?
Thanks in advance.

There actually were a posting here on that, Yea found it:

LINK

(For your information)

 

[Freedda]

We know that the sequence is somehow connected to the Later Heaven bagua, but can we prove this connection?

I guess I don't understand your question. What 'connection' are you trying to prove? By way of an anology, to me what you're asking sounds something like, 'what is the connection between John Smith and John Smith?' Isn't the later heaven bagua the sequence? Or at least a sequence?

 

[Marcip]

Sorry if my question wasn't clear enough. The Later Heaven is a sequence of 8 trigrams, while the King Wen sequence is the whole book, the 64 hexagrams.
The Xian Tian, or Early Heaven is clean and symmetrical, the Later Heaven is a bit messy. The ordering of the 64 hexagrams are a bit messy too.
Thanks for the link, I like the hidden patterns, but there should be some real, unhidden patterns between the Later Heaven and the King Wen sequence. Or it's just the disorder which connects them?

 

[svenrus]

My very personal approach to the question about the way in which king Wan ordered the 64 hexagrams is that he took each opposit and reversed hexagram following each other in the same way that we would order books in a library to get hold of them like a,b,c,d etc. I mean to be able more quickly to find the hexagrams received - after what I'd understood, before that, the diviners "simply" just remembered (at the time before king Wan the tradition were orally/spoken/memorized) the meaning of the hexagrams received - today we have being more dependent on written material, simply can't remember the meaning of a received hexagram or have to look it up in a table; unless having plenty of time to go all the 64 hexagrams through. Something like if we went to a library and no one there had ordered the books we could use years finding the books we were searching for - similary king Wan made a bit of order in the 64 hexagrams; but again: my very personal view at it.....

 

[bradford]

The King Wen is almost exactly half orderly, using two of its dimensions (Inverse and Opposite). Then the result of that was shuffled into a random sequence. This was done specifically to drive overly fussy and obsessive people insane.

 

[svenrus]

Just as possible as my view at it (sorry for the smiley )

 

[Marcip]

Too bad we don't know King Wen's real intentions. I can't believe it's just a joke.
Or maybe just now he looks down at me from the Palace of Heavens, laughing: Look at this fool! 3000 years have passed, and he won't give up! He stays up at night, trying to solve my riddle! Hilarious!
I don't really know.
It is possible that he was the first one who wrote down and ordered all the hexagrams. If that's the case, I won't blame him for the disorder anymore: at least he tried
But before the hexagrams were all collected and written down, you could only see them emerging into the world through casting the yarrow stalks... That could have been magical. How many great signs are? Who knows? Their numbers are possibly infinite.

 

[svenrus]

Too bad we don't know King Wen's real intentions. I can't believe it's just a joke.
Or maybe just now he looks down at me from the Palace of Heavens, laughing: Look at this fool! 3000 years have passed, and he won't give up! He stays up at night, trying to solve my riddle! Hilarious!
I don't really know.
It is possible that he was the first one who wrote down and ordered all the hexagrams. If that's the case, I won't blame him for the disorder anymore: at least he tried
But before the hexagrams were all collected and written down, you could only see them emerging into the world through casting the yarrow stalks... That could have been magical. How many great signs are? Who knows? Their numbers are possibly infinite.

This is what we are told and probably also the truth about it. But again, "He sits up there smiling" and we got (up to now at least) no chance at all to ask him....

 

[svenrus]

Now, this is a bit strange: After having replied here I later went to surf my inboxes on certain mail In-boxes and an UpDate showed up from the birocco.com (Yijing Dao Update) homepage with this LINK

(I'm subscribed to this site, and I can recommend it in case You are not allready…..)

 

[Freedda]

.... an UpDate showed up from the birocco.com (Yijing Dao Update) homepage with this LINK

I read a bit of this article, 'The solution of the King Wen sequence?' but pretty quickly got lost in the math and computations. That said, I did read some from author József Drasny's conclusion:

At the end ... I could not imagine how the author had arrived at this conclusion. I believed that I had overlooked some essential parts of the text. Therefore, I began to read anew, ... looking for some arguments, but in vain.

****
At first, he arbitrarily assigned ... to the fundamental units of the received sequence. He did not give any explanation or argument for this proposition .... Then, he made up a long story around the embedded pseudo-sequence. In the role of the original author, he invented ... science ....

****
In ... the process ..., Cook created new and arbitrary operations, and with the help of them regenerated the WW sequence. It is true that, at the end of the procedure, the hexagrams stood in the well-known order, but it was him alone who had arranged them .... Unfortunately, the author also went astray in the field of mathematics ....

****
In sum, Cook's theory has remained unproved for me.​

So, what we seem to have here is yet another unproven (and unprovable) theory about the sequence.

That said, people are of course free to explore the Yi in whatever way they want to (regardless of how I might feel about it), but I don't really see how this exploration, or an answer to the 'how and why' of the sequence - or to solve its 'mystery' (if one even exists) - would in any way help me in actually using the Yi.

Best, D.

 

[svenrus]

I'm not that into math either, only try to find inspirations to marcip: "I'm trying to solve the mystery of the sequence... ok, I know it's impossible, but I like working on this project, and it changed my thinking completely over the years. " (#1)
If something seems impossible that's the fuel for the search for solutions. Or: that we should be able to fly ? Leave that to the birds... Today we know better I guess.

 

[Marcip]

Thanks, Svenrus. I don't use the I-Ching for divination, my spiritual practice is thinking about the King Wen sequence. But not all the time. I had hard times with it maybe ten years ago, then I stopped completely.
A few weeks ago I just wanted to make some fancy diagrams, and again, a pattern came out, similar to King Wen's. Tried to follow it, made a lot of drawings, but this path leads deeply into the woods... Maybe I should put them up on a blog page and forget about it.

 

[svenrus]

As long as it dosn't drive You mad ( ) it's good gymn for the brain. I find Shao Yungs arrangement (maybe better known as the Fuxi arrangement) much more logic and if I'm not wrong this was the system that the philospher Leibnitz were astonished about being so old, as it fitted his binary arrangement...

 

[dryjoe]

So, what we seem to have here is yet another unproven (and unprovable) theory about the sequence.

That said, people are of course free to explore the Yi in whatever way they want to (regardless of how I might feel about it), but I don't really see how this exploration, or an answer to the 'how and why' of the sequence - or to solve its 'mystery' (if one even exists) - would in any way help me in actually using the Yi.

'Of far greater significance than the use of the Book of Changes as an oracle is its other use, namely, as a book of wisdom.' (R. Wilhelm/W. Baynes)
There are many people, and there were in the past, who believe that not only the hexagrams and their texts but the order of the hexagrams have some spiritual, historical, or philosophical contents. Richard S. Cook, sinologist, university professor, belongs to them.
Cook discovered an arrangement that demonstrates some essential features of the received sequence. He tried to find a rational explanation of these features. However, according to the reviewer, he did not succeed in the proof.

The fact that Cook's theory has remained unproved (for those who believe in the truth of the review) does not mean that other subsequent attempts necessarily will be unprovable in the future. Maybe just Cook's arrangement will help to find the right solution. If we receive some more information about the philosophical or historical background of the King Wen sequence, perhaps the divinations will be more successful.

joseph (alias dryjoe)
the author of the review

 

[Freedda]

joseph (alias dryjoe) .... the author of the review

Are you saying here that you're József Drasny (whom wrote the review of Cole's book)?

.... Maybe just Cook's arrangement will help to find the right solution. If we receive some more information about the philosophical or historical background of the King Wen sequence, perhaps the divinations will be more successful.

As I said, people are free to do whatever they want with the Yi. However, here it seems you are doing a great deal of if-ing: if Cole's book leads people to have more insights into the sequence, and if we get more infromation and background about the sequence, and if this leads someone to discover the solution to the mystery of the sequence, and if that mystery actually contains anything that might change or add to how we use the YI, then ... maybe ... we might have more successful divinations.

That's an awful lot of ifs. And it reminds me of the search for El Dorado by the Spanish: if this city of gold exists, and if it contains as much gold as we hope it does, and if we can actually find it, then ....

D.

 

[svenrus]

There are those though that use the king Wen sequence in practical divination, Alfred Huang*) to example:

​

( But the use of this in divination is another discussion…. Personally I don't. To find out exactly WHY one Gua follows the other in this particular order and to know and see the cause of it could be of interest in those cases where You use the above shown Sequence-order in Your divination. )

*) The Complete I Ching

 

[Freedda]

There are those though that use the king Wen sequence in practical divination, Alfred Huang*) to example ....

Regarding what's in Alfred Huang ... there is something similar in Wilhelm, third section, where he talks about the sequence for each hexagram - this is from one of the Wings.

One idea is that these sequence statements are meant to be a mnemonic of sorts, to aid in memorizing the order of the hexagrams. I find they often don't make a lot of sense, as in the example above, so I don't find them very useful. It's as if someone picked two unrelated terms and then made up some way that they're connected, or that one follows the other.

There seems to be two threads of thought intertwined in this thread (nice pun): one is the idea of finding the 'mystery' of the King Wen sequence, which could involve some sort of master formula (math or otherwise) that would explain the why of the sequence, - why one hexagram follows the other. I assume that if anyone were to discover this, it would not change the sequence or the pairs or the order of the hexagrams. This is what I assumed much of this thread is about.

One the other hand, I suppose that there could be some discovery or insight ... or whatever ... about the sequence which might actually change it in some why. In that case, it could likely affect the order, the pairs and the sequence and would be a very big deal in that regard.

But for me, I think that if the meanings, lines and trigrams of each hexagram remained the same - regardless of this great mystery - how I use the Yi would remain the same. And since nothing like this has been discovered in the last 2,800 years or so, I ain't holding my breathe for a time when things are going to change.

Best, D

 

[Marcip]

I've found an interesting article about the subject:
Structural Principles in the Zhou Yijing 周易經 Hexagram Sequence, by Larry Schulz
You don't need to go through all the inversed and reversed pairs if not really interested, I'll copy just a part of the conclusion here:
"Echoing Wang Bi, Lai Zhihde (1525-1604) lamented that "the Yi's images have lost their transmission". One of the 'images' that he sought to retrieve was the signifance of the division of the Zhou Yijing into two 'classics'. He inferred that there was more to the Hexagram Sequence than was immediately apparent..."

 

[svenrus]

Hi Marcip,

Many years ago I downloaded this pdf (not sure, but sino-platonic-papers were where I got it from ?) and back then my thought about it was simply: "another speculative attempt"; I've seen it through again now and will not state that it's speculative, that it's only because I can not grap it - maybe too complicated to me ? I don't think my IQ breaks the ice - I'll avoid it.... Somehow something, generally, tells me that when systems/the promovations of/explanation to (...) are too complicated to relate to at a glance: it ain't the solution I can accept, seen from my point of logical sense ie the system being unnatural or simply: simple and obvious-less.

[As an example to how I myself once got entangled: LINK, but this was an attempt to find the co-ordination between the 64 hexagrams and the Solarcyclus - and the only valuable in this pdf are the tables given in the end originating from various chinese philosophers]

 

[Gmulii]

[As an example to how I myself once got entagled: LINK, but this was an attempt to find the co-ordination between the 64 hexagrams and the Sun-cyclus - and the only valuable in this pdf are the tables given in the end originating from various chinese philosophers]

Glanced over the pdf... I see what the author is trying to accomplish and to some degree it can work, but there is another framework this is suppose to be done in, in my humble opinion.

For this specific aspect(Hexagrams to Suns position during the year) we need Xuan Kong Da Gua 玄空大卦. And the written texts on XKDG was Earth Study Discern Truth(https://www.amazon.com/Earth-Study-Discern-Truth-Second/dp/9833332692) by Dahong(legendary feng shui Grandmaster).

Dahong is known by his skill to make his books impossible to understand for outsiders.
If we see stuff written from him in other sources(preface to other books etc.) its usually awesome material to read, so its not his style of reading, just his books published for the open world were made on purpose like that. The end result is that some of the very improtant parts of all this will be impossible to find in written sources of old. Yet would be very practiced and alive even today all around China and the countries around it.

So lets see what XKDG, actually shows on that.
To do that we need to look at their Lo Pan(that is compass + relation written on the outside of it, many systems in the Five Arts have their own) we can see how the Hexagrams align to the time of the year, time of the day, directions and to the degrees of the each direction(and to much more).

We are looking at the outer ring of Hexagrams.

At the lowest part we have Winter Solstice, at highest Summer Solstice, Spring Equinox on the left and Autumn Equinox on the right.

At the most outer ring after the degrees, we may be wondering why the western name of the dates(Jan 21 etc) seem to be out of sync with that, moved clockwise to where the Solstice should be. The reason for that, is that that specific ring is the so called Great Sun Formula(太阳到山). While that is something very useful and interesting its another story, so lets just say it doesn't show the actual date, the solstice would be between the white and black parts of the formula(at 0/360 degrees).
(this is random image from google images on search for xkdg lo pan it should be similar on any XKDG or big San Yuan compass).


In other parts of Feng Shui we can see other relations between Hexagrams and Trigrams, however for this aspect XKDG is where we can look. In there all this is very heavily used in practice as the whole system is very much based on how Hexagrams relate to each other and to space.

Although I do have to mention that translating between systems is not always done in the way one way thing. Not everything always works exactly in the same way. And when it comes to Hexagrams and the times of the year, practice has shown that only 12 of them actually show a clear indication of specific time in divination. The rest, while very connected to the directions, are more connected to the Stems/branches of specific days, months and years, so in that sense will be different each year.

 

[svenrus]

Do You think that king Wen have had any intention to make his hexagram order fit with the calendar (Solar- Moon Cyclus) ?

[Return]​

 

[Gmulii]

Do You think that king Wen have had any intention to make his hexagram order fit with the calendar (Solar- Moon Cyclus) ?

I wanted to comment on the FuXi arrangment, as that was the one I saw was in the pdf. The original one in the Zhouyi I shouldn't comment on, now. : )

 

[svenrus]

I've searched for it without luck but because I didn't succeed doesn't mean that it isn't hidden in his ordering of the hexagrams - I asked because of the theme of this thread.

( The pdf You mention I placed in a paranthesis [#21] as an example to what I wrote there..... )

 

[Freedda]

Do You think that king Wen have had any intention to make his hexagram order fit with the calendar?

I don't really know, and as I've said, I'm not all that into the 'mystery of the sequence' ... however, there are a number of hexagrams which have associations with different months and seasons - though I don't know if any order is implied (all from Bradford Hatcher):

Twelve of the Gua were associated with the 12 Months of the Year from a very early date ...

Hex. 19 associated with the 12th Month of the year, the month of getting ready to really get ready to begin working on this new year's harvest, now a mere "eight months" away.

Hex. 24, returning, associated with the turning (or return) of the Four Seasons. And also associated with the Winter Solstice.

Hex. 49 with Seasonal Change.

... and I'm sure there is more to this ....

Best, D.

 

[svenrus]

... and I'm sure there is more to this ....

Those twelwe hexagrams king Wen didn't incorporate in his hexagram order in the logic sense without which they will give no meaning. He did not use them at all.
(Here they are in their logic order but with their places numbered in the king Wen order: 1-44-33-12-20-23-2-24-19-11-34-43. And their logic order shown on this page: LINK. )

 

[Freedda]

Those twelwe hexagrams king Wen didn't incorporate in his hexagram order in the logic sense without which they will give no meaning. He did not use them at all. (Here they are in their logic order but with their places numbered in the king Wen order: 1-44-33-12-20-23-2-24-19-11-34-43. And their logic order shown on this page: LINK. )

Thanks. I downloaded the calendar and will take some time to take a longer look. However, at first glance, and from what I understand you to say, the seasonal cyclic order of the hexagrams in this calendar don't have any chronological sense or have any immediately discernible order as related to how the hexagrams are ordered in the Yi (1 through 64).

Which doesn't mean that these particular hexagrams don't have meanings associated with the seasons or months, or with a yearly cycle, it's just that they don't fit a particular 'order' in how they are arranged.

... which might all add up to answer your question, which is:

King Wen DID NOT have had any intention to make his hexagram order fit with the calendar.

... or that's one take-away from what you've shared.

Best, d.

 

[svenrus]

- and neither does these twelwe "Tidal Guas" as Alfred Huang names them fit in to the arrangement which Shao Yong made (or the Fuxi order, also named), and personal my IQ don't reach the ability to make them fit into the 64 Gua's in a logic manner, I mean equally and symmetric. That will not make me believe that there is not a solution anyway.
But again, in this we are moving away from the path: the theme in this thread.... Unless of course it's OK with Our Host, Marcip

 

[Marcip]

I have never studied the I-Ching as a calendar, so I can't form any opinions now. But wonderful people are posting here, that one's for sure. And until we don't find the true meaning of the sequence, it can be anything: a calendar, a map, a key to the eternal life... or it can be also a joke too. So feel free to share your thoughts.