Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).
The person who told me this is a Chinese convert to Christianity, she based it on the fact that there are sixty six books in the Bible (at least that's what she told me, I have never read it or checked). Perhaps such comparisons are facile, after all there are said to be lots of books missing from the Bible as well. I was slightly mad when I wrote the original post (I am diagnosed as a schizophrenic for my sins) however I do think there is something in the idea of the King Wen sequence being a magic square (the mathematical name of matrices like those that appear in Soduko) that approximates some significant constant, but this might be wishful thinking, much like the two hexagrams missing comparison.Hmmm, that sounds tricky to me: Two hexagrams missing ???
It seems to me that the very simple reason we have 64 six-line figures (hexagrams), is because that's the maximum number of unique combinations of solid or broken lines you can have within a 6-line figure.
It's sort of like a 3x3 soduko cube: if you have one number in each space, you'll always have 9 numbers to work with, not 10, or 7, or 23. And the same is true for the 64 hexgrams.
And I don't see how it serves us to complicate this fact, though some may seek to find additional means in the bible or fibinocci numbers, or the easter bunny, or alien abductions ... and so forth.
Best, D.
I have often said that maths is like looking in the clouds, and with numerology you can often see anything you want. So on one level, I agree, why complicate things. On the other hand the golden mean (ratio) known as phi in mathematics crops up in many commentaries on the Yi Jing and this is related to the Fibonacci sequence that Swen mentions. However the Lo Shu doesn't contain the number ten to my knowledge, so I don't quite see the connection he points out, unless I am mistaken. Thank you.It seems to me that the very simple reason we have 64 six-line figures (hexagrams), is because that's the maximum number of unique combinations of solid or broken lines you can have within a 6-line figure.
It's sort of like a 3x3 soduko cube: if you have one number in each space, you'll always have 9 numbers to work with, not 10, or 7, or 23. And the same is true for the 64 hexgrams.
And I don't see how it serves us to complicate this fact, though some may seek to find additional means in the bible or fibinocci numbers, or the easter bunny, or alien abductions ... and so forth.
Best, D.
Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).