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Which came first: trigrams or hexagrams?

hilary

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Edited February 12, 2024: this is a continuation of this thread. ~Liselle

Summarising in broad strokes: Chinese tradition says trigrams came first, and were assembled into hexagrams, maybe by Fuxi, maybe by King Wen. The modern scholarly consensus is that hexagrams came first, trigrams were extrapolated later. Said 'modern scholarly consensus' is not accepted by Brad, for one.

I sit on the fence, and wait for enough impetus one way or the other to dislodge me.

A good (the only?) place to look for this is the text of the Zhouyi itself. Do hexagram names and texts show evidence the writers were thinking about trigrams?

Some signs they didn't: there is no consistent correlation between the presence of 'water' in the name of hexagrams, and in the trigrams. There's a water trigram and water in the character for hexagram 5, for instance, but water with no water trigram in 11 and 53, and water trigram with no water radical all over the place (3, 4, 7, 8...). (I wish I could remember who first pointed this out in an email to the Hexagram-8 list years ago.)

Of course someone should look through for signs of pits rather than running water where kan is present - outside the hexagram it's named for, of course. I don't think there are many. (Interesting that hexagram 5 is the exception again.)

There are 8 hexagrams made of doubled trigrams. Only one of the eight has the word 'xi', 'repeated', in its name.

More generally, if the authors had trigram attributes in mind, you might expect to see some conspicuous references to these in the moving line texts - to stillness or to mountains in the first three lines of #15, to take a random example.

Has anyone ever put all the moving lines that are the top of gen next to one another, for instance, and looked for common themes?

Of course, if you approach a given line with reference to constituent and nuclear trigrams, and with all the associations of the Shuogua at your disposal, you surely ought to be able to come up with some correlations. But what do you get if you approach it the other way about, looking at the lines alone without this equipment? Any trigram-related patterns at all?

Now, quick before I fall off this fence, someone...
 
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lightofdarkness

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qualities came first. Representations of those qualities followed. The 'fixed' trigrams reflect a subset of the whole that allows for trigrams with moving lines that represent hexagrams, and hexagrams with moving lines that represent dodecagrams.

Interestingly, the 'doubled' trigrams do NOT reflect this compression of dodecagrams into hexagrams into trigrams. See the wave interference patterns in the "Book of Structures" pages (hexagram relationships covered below). What the locals do with their 'small world network' is another matter ;-)

With the qualities shared across all members of the species so the locals specialised their representations - and the ancient Chinese hit on a 'good' method - if a bit limiting in its formal expressions.

----------------
pure trigram : hexagram representation
heaven : 1
lake : 34
fire : 61
thunder : 19
wind : 33
water : 62
mountain : 20
earth : 2

(changing line trigrams = 64 possibles, hexagrams = 4096, dodecagrams = 16+million)

The above eight qualities are invarient over change, all of the other qualities form into 'superpositions' and so the wave patterns. At the level of trigrams we are dealing with attractors, 8 of them. Move to hexagrams and there are 64 BUT 8 of those are 'invarient' in their qualities when compared to the trigrams. Same goes for 4096 dodecagrams where 8 are invarient.

IOW we are looking as we do in Astronomy - trigrams = naked eye, hexagrams = binoculars, dodecagrams = telescopes.

EACH level allows us to create its own little world and so happily use trigrams or hexagrams or dodecagrams for interpretations; all that changes are qualitative refinements that we can then project onto the 'lesser' levels.

If we map these line compressions then trigrams (in their fullest form of 'vague' changing-line representations) are first. hexagrams second. dodecagrams third.

Trigrams are 'limiting', dodecagrams too 'over the top' so the middle is favoured - hexagrams with changing lines.

Due to the recursion in their creation you cannot start with hexagrams BUT the vagueness of the trigram levels (2^3) would favour a focus on hexagrams (2^6) to a degree they would dominate in meaning derivation (2^12 is too much for most)

SO - what came first? feelings - all else follows in various forms, local conditions favouring one interpretation over others etc etc etc

Chris.
 

bradford_h

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Hi Hilary -
This is a paragraph from my Xiao Gua chapter, touching on some of this. Bottom line, academics seem to believe that "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" and their protocols don't allow them to look inside the Zhouyi itself for clues to its meanings. I'd say the biggest suggestions come from the use of reiteratives in the Chong Gua (double diaagram) texts, beginning with Qian Qian at 01.3.

The Scale of Eight is represented only by the Ba Gua, the eight three-line diagrams. Despite the assertions made in the legendary history of the Yi that the Ba Gua came down from ancient times, to be later combined into the sixty-four Gua, there is as yet no strong evidence of this either in early literature or among the Shang dynasty Oracle or Dragon Bones. There is only the assumption that an elemental concept (Ba Gua) must precede a compound one (Gua). But, as the text of the Da Xiang, or Overall Image, makes delightfully clear, there is no better way to decipher the meaning of a Hexagram text than by analyzing the relationship between its two constituent Ba Gua. It appears unlikely that the sets of meanings and connotations of the Ba Gua were very fully developed at the time the Zhouyi was written. Elemental images such as water, wood and shock will appear in the text where they might be expected. There are also certain preponderances of ideas which occur with statistical significance in the Chong Gua, those Hexagrams composed of three-line figures doubled (e.g. words for seems or likeness in Gua 30). Because there is neither an external reference nor an explicit internal reference to the Ba Gua in the Zhouyi, the modernists insist that they did not exist yet. This is another fallacy - a lot of elements and dimensions are never explicitly mentioned. And it completely ignores another statistically significant phenomenon: there exists a very intriguing plethora of Chinese reiteratives in the Chong Gua. These are doubled words such as xi xi, e e, su su, suo suo and jue jue in Gua 51. There is also the phrase Xi Kan, repeated crisis, as the Gua Ming for Gua 29. (William deFancourt also develops this line of thinking in his "Some Thoughts on the Eight Trigrams," in Oracle 1.4). There will be more said on other aspects of this subject under History.
 

cal val

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Hilary...

Although I don't believe I'll ever fall off the fence without being presented with conclusive evidence, considering the evolution of Chinese divination that is being increasingly 'illuminated' by archaeological findings in the 20th century, I'm leaning toward the hexagrams-came-first side of the fence. In fact... considering the recent archaeological findings... and the inconsistent nature of sixth lines, I'm leaning toward the pentagrams-came-first possibility.

My feeling on trigrams is that they probably pretty much fall under the chapter heading, 'Systems' 'Intellectual' Men Have Divised Over the Ages To Compensate For Their lack Of Intuition.

Love,

Val
 
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ewald

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Currently I mostly ignore the trigrams, focussing mainly on the line texts of the Zhouyi (translating from the Chinese). So that focus is not prompting me to go study the trigrams in more depth. (I may in the future however, if I come to think it can deepen my understanding.)

I don't think that the double characters, or the Xi Kan in hex. 29 are necessarily evidence of awareness of trigrams. Xi Kan may very well refer to the image of the hexagram lines, and all the repeated characters in hex. 51 as well, but reference to that image doesn't imply awareness of trigrams, or a theory about it. Such a theory may have been there, though.

Ewald
 

bradford_h

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Hi Ewald-

RE; I don't think that the double characters, or the Xi Kan in hex. 29 are necessarily evidence of awareness of trigrams.

Please don't change my words for me.
I was very careful to use the word "suggestions" instead of "evidence"
 

kevin

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<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>quote:</font>

'Systems' 'Intellectual' Men Have Divised Over the Ages To Compensate For Their lack Of Intuition .<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>

I wouldn't agree? I work with trigrams quite a lot. It means working with images imaginatively (danger of tautology here) and intuitively to try and feel how they might interact and what light that might shed on the hexagram. No language to rely on.

You may well be right re Pentagrams. Steve Moore , in Trigrams of Han, postulated that there could have been an earlier version of the Yi made up of pentagrams as there are a number of versions which only have text for five changing lines.

Again this might just mean that there were a number of similar oracles knocking around and not necessarily that there was a development from one to the next.

Thinking more about Mr Taylor?s very successful mapping of the pattern of the Lo Shu Diagram onto the Early Heaven sequence. It might just mean that those who devised the Early Heaven sequence used the Lo Shu as a template. It wouldn?t therefore aid us in the problem Hilary has in being stuck on a fence.

--Kevin
 
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ewald

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Brad - Sorry for that misunderstanding, I intended to give my view on the thing you noted, not say that you were presenting something as evidence.

Ewald
 

hilary

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And of course, signs of an awareness that there is a repeated pattern in 8 hexagrams, or that there's an awkward transition between lines 3 and 4, doesn't necessarily mean any ideas that trigrams have independent characteristics, constant between hexagrams. (Good grief, that was a convoluted sentence. You know what I mean.)

Someone pass me up a cushion.
 

bradford_h

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Let me clarify something-
Nowhere in my work do I claim to refute or disprove any of the modern academic trends and fads. In fact, I specifically say this. I do suggest that a basic course in logic be required for a degree in philosophy. I am merely pointing out the logical fallacies of their argumets and methodologies to counter the statements they make with such smug and often fatuous certainty. I seem to be fighting a losing battle to keep Yixue students from seizing on these hypotheses and then closing their minds prematurely to what remain valid possibilities.
I think belief is wholly inappropriate in Yixue, given what little we know of the Yi's formative era.
In Nietzhe's words: "But what convinces us isn't necessarily true - it is merely convincing. A note for asses."
The fact that these scholars are credentialed and use footnotes and get published seems like all that is needed for the believers to follow them blindly without question. This is why I would make "The Emperor's New Clothes" required reading for all Yixue students. There are a lot of butt-naked scholars marching proudly down that road in their special new clothes.
 
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ewald

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Indeed, a lot of people seem to believe that Science Equals Truth. But that's just a belief.

Ewald
 

lindsay

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On the ?trigrams-may-be-older-than-you-think? side of the fence, I would like to remind everyone the sequence of hexagrams in the Mawangdui or Silk MS ? the oldest surviving copy of the Yi ? is determined entirely by their trigram components.

The Mawangdui hexagram sequence is ordered according to the upper trigram, with all the upper male trigrams (Qian, Gen, Kan, and Zhen) followed by all the upper female trigrams (Kun, Dui, Li, and Xun). The lower trigrams also follow a specific order beneath each upper trigram in the hexagram sequence ? Qian, Kun, Gen, Dui, Kan, Li, Zhen, and Xun ? except that the first upper trigram of a set always pairs with itself in the lower trigram. See Shaughnessy, pp. 17-18, 28-29.

The Silk MS was buried about 168 BC, but the use of taboo characters in the text suggests the MS was actually copied around 190 BC (Shaughnessy, p. 15).

Keep in mind that Liu Bang, founder of the Han dynasty, reigned from 206-195 BC. To call the Mawangdui a Han production is probably technically correct, but all wrong if one means to imply the MS is the product of the great Han intellectual ferment that took place much later. It seems safe to say that some ancient Chinese diviners were thinking about the Yi in terms of trigrams at the very dawn of the Han era, and probably even earlier.

The truth is we do not understand the provenance of the Mawangdui Yi at all. Some people suggest it was a fluke, an eccentric and individual edition, a Neanderthal-like branch off the main trunk of the traditional received text. Given the state of our knowledge, however, this is a very risky assumption. The tradition behind the Silk MS could easily extend far back into Zhou times.

The one thing we know for certain is the editor of the Mawangdui MS was thinking about the Yi in terms of its trigram components, and s/he was doing so long before most scholars have supposed Han intellectuals ?invented? the trigrams.
 

hilary

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That's a nice one, Lindsay. Wobbling a tiny bit here. You know I also think the King Wen Sequence shows distinct 'trigram awareness' - though goodness only knows when that dates from.
 

bradford_h

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Trigram interpretation also occurs in the Zuozhuan, which purportedly chronicles Yi interpretations after 692 bce. It is conceivable that none of this was set down until around 350 bce, but this also pushes the dates for Ba Gua back to before the Han.
 

lightofdarkness

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Kevin,

You wrote:
>
> You may well be right re Pentagrams. Steve Moore , in Trigrams of Han,
> postulated that there could have been an earlier version of the Yi
> made up of pentagrams as there are a number of versions which only
> have text for five changing lines.
>

If you focus on the natural development of the IC symbols, recursion of yin/yang, (see diagram http://www.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/btree.png )

It is immediately recognisable that each ROW in that recursion is a row of EXPRESSION of the qualities of the previous row. Thus the 64 hexagrams of row 6, are the EXPRESSIONS of the 32 qualities at row 5, as the expressions a row 5 are the expressions of the 16 qualities at row 4, down to the monograms at row 1 that represent the cutting of T'ai Chi into parts.

Thus the 32 PAIRS at level 6 reflect the expression of pentagram qualities. E.g. 02, 23 reflect the expression of a quality represented in five lines where the sixth line, the top line, differentiates the unconditional nature vs the conditional nature in expression.

AS we work backwards we move from particulars to general, from crisp to vague, from differentiated to increasingly integrated, from dodecagrams to hexagrams to trigrams to digrams to monograms to ... the 'whole' - that 'cut', the monograms, is into yin/yang qualities and so representable by the more detailed hexagrams of 01/02.

In the traditional sequence the pairing indicates the SAME methodology at work but focused more on qualitative distinctions where reduction takes us back to core qualities of 01/64.

See the section of the "Logic of Relationships" in the Book of Structures pages.

At ALL levels of analysis we find the XOR/AND dynamic at work. Of special interest is that it does not matter where you start, be it with one line or three or six of five, over time you will 'fill in the dots' to bring out the full spectrum of the IC, its universal form - how come? Simply because it is hard coded into all of us as neuron-dependent species. That coding is 'general', reflects genetics and so universals in need of local context to give them 'life'.

Chris.
 

heylise

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Could it be that the structure of Yi has nothing to do with any age of origin?

I think it is an expression of a universal structure. The one who saw it first, gave a form to it, and maybe others did the same. Maybe with hexagrams, or pentagrams, or tetragrams or trigrams. Or combining two trigrams, but who knows if the ?inventor? put them on top of each other, or doubled all the lines of a single trigram? Han Boering has a beautiful theory about this, supported by the text of the Wings.

The hexagrams seem to have been the ?best? form, giving a very good description of most happenings. Cycles of time, the human body, the unfolding of an event. Six steps are a very harmonious way to work with. Four is excellent too, but often a bit rough, and more than 6 can be too complicated.

The trigrams have not been ?made? by a mind, but discovered. They were always there, and the hexagrams were, and the tetragrams?
I agree with Chris: ?hard coded into all of us?

When you need them, they are there. When you don?t, then you simply don?t see or use them. When you don?t know about them, you might discover them, or someone might tell you and you see them ? or not. It depends all on your own mind, how it works, what it needs.

Maybe some day a very old vessel or oracle bone with a trigram will be discovered. Until now ?x-grams? were only found on bronze vessels, some with 6, others with less lines. Then it will be ?evidence? the trigrams came before the hexagrams.. until a still older one with a hexagram is discovered..
I don?t think it can ever be known, and if it will, that it is not really important.

(Lindsay, nice you?re here!)

LiSe
 

heylise

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Got some chocolate and tea, mind if I join you on that fence and share it? Beautiful view on universe from here...
LiSe
 

lightofdarkness

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Well said LiSe, the FULL spectrum of meanings, as UNIVERSALS, are in us all.

In the ad-hoc way in which we have discovered things over a considerable time span, so different LOCAL representations are formed but, over time, they will ALL 'sum' to start to show the full spectrum, the universal qualities, behind them.

As covered in the diagram in the "Book of Structures" - the full spectrum is a 'regular network' where all points are connected to all others to give us an integrated whole. As such, focus on any ONE point and it will, over time, show you all of the others.

The integrated whole is our genetic being, and also that shared with all other neuron-dependent life forms. The exposure of that to the immediacy of a local context (deemed 'random') will customise that whole, bias it to 'fit in' with the local context - we develop 'small world networks'.

BUT, conscious beings experiencing this without knowing about the full spectrum will interpret the LOCAL form as a UNIVERSAL form when in fact it isnt.

I can form some school that works with yin/yang, or di grams or trigrams or hexagrams as 'fundamental' but over time I will (a) have to get some 'fresh blood' to develop further and (b) find that my perspective, even though with different words, will start to look and feel like a lot of other perspectives - and THAT is because the ad-hoc development of all of the perspectives is starting to fill in the dots that bring out the universals.

This is in fact a huge 'double slit' experiment where each 'dot' that appears on the photographic plate is a unique perspective but over time a wave pattern develops showing that they are all in fact linked together.

As such 'out there' is very much encoded 'in here' and so we can 'resonate' with the universe. The 'additional' element is our consciousness, our agent of mediation that is at times responsible for 'paradox' but can 'get it right' given time ;-)

Chris.
 

lindsay

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Thanks, LiSe. I?m enjoying the discussion, and as usual, I find myself agreeing with you. I think divination is a little bit like shopping for shoes. Sometimes the first pair make your feet smile. But sometimes you have to try on pair after pair before you find the right style and fit.

Many times, when asking the Yi an important question, I?ve been completely baffled by the words of the texts. That?s when I start looking for something else. Trigrams? Line positions? Nuclear hexagrams? Fan yao? The more pairs of shoes you can try on, the more likely you?ll find a fit.

Val may be right that all these aids to interpretation were born out of a failure to understand the oracle in the first place. Or perhaps there was also a desire to amplify, to find out more, to go beyond intuition and explore the hidden meaning of the Yi?s pattern-language.

Humans love to find patterns. I guess that?s Chris?s point. It?s probably a survival mechanism, the nature of the beast. Why would we feel compelled to look for patterns, if they were not in some sense ?real?? There?s no advantage I can think of, evolutionary or genetic or metaphysical, to being drawn to meaningless pursuits. A good pattern is almost as satisfying as chocolate and tea.
 

lightofdarkness

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BTW - because our consciousness can only handle a few things at once (5 + or - 2) so dealing with a large amount of categories is counter-productive. IN the IC, the jump from 4096 to 16+million is extreme such that the dodecagrams 4096 - aka 64 hexagrams with changing lines) level is enough - and there is a LOT there that is not covered in the traditional texts and so in need of development.

The scope of each hexagram in its universal, and so general/vague form, is large enough to map anything at a qualitative level. We can use trigrams with moving lines but they are general and so can be too vague when compared to hexagrams with moving lines. We can use dodecagrams with moving lines but that would be too extreme, after all we ARE looking at ANY dichotomy being expanded into 4096 'variations' on the theme!. (and not forgetting the ability to extract a spectrum from a hexagram, and so even more details)

Chris.
 

hilary

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Chocolate?

happy.gif


Well, Lindsay and Brad have pushed trigram discovery back a bit. LiSe is absolutely right that they were always there. Certainly they are here now and part of readings.

Though maybe if we shift them, sometimes, other patterns will show more clearly. It's interesting to think about how someone might have compared 9 and 26, for instance, without thinking about trigram characteristics.


Meanwhile I am still looking for some clear signs that the 'consensus' (heh) that people only thought of trigrams many centuries later might be wrong. Chris gave me the idea of another place to look.

If the trigram idea was in the air as people wrote the Zhouyi, then the hexagrams made of trigrams with doubled lines (19, 20, 33, 34, 61, 62 - 1 and 2 just being themselves) might have strong allusions to the meaning of their trigram. If these were present, then said 'consensus' would be blown altogether out of the water.

There aren't many obvious correlations, but neither are they hugely discordant, especially if you look to Stephen Field's suggested meanings:

Quake/ manifesting: 19 (absolutely)
Stillness: 20 (skipping Stephen F this time as it doesn't fit
wink.gif
)
Mediator, words for the shaman: 34 (not particularly?)
Kneeling, yielding: 33 (sort of?)
The Pit, suffering: 62 (narrow mountain pass?)
Bird of omen, revealing: 61 (there are a couple of birds around)

Any comments/ improvements?
 

lightofdarkness

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The generic qualities are representable as formal hexagrams associated with 'vague' feelings that are invariant over translation - the focus here is on a loss of differentiation where the focus is on PAIRS of lines that get treated as if one 'line' - as such a hexagram is made up of three digrams, not two trigrams. As we go for more details and so become increasingly differentiating so precision increases, lake now gets covered in 58, fire in 30 etc etc:

When viewed from the univeral level, and so reflecting generic qualities:

01 Heaven - heaven

34 invigorating - lake - the focus of lake is its intensity in expression, its association with a dynamic with an audience, a focus on replication, mimicry, copying, exciting others THROUGH oneself (very 'showbiz') but also allows for self-invigoration - that voice at the back of your head going 'come ON, move it!'

61 Inner truth - fire - the intense exterior and the soft centre. Ss fire expands so all within it bounds is converted to ash - to sameness, and so to a state of shared meaning, resonance, empathy (ideal, ideology etc), a strong quality expressed in the hexagram of 61 (here we have mapped the hexagram as a source of analogy/metaphor for the general quality compressed into what we eventually label as 'fire'.)

19 Approach - thunder - the low approaches the high. IN the binary ordering thunder is the low as it approaches heaven, the high through fire and lake. The origin of 'new' ideas, paradigms, etc reflects the movement from the periphery to the position of 'dogma'; the current aristocracy/leader etc
In the sociological domain the pair of thunder/wind opposite the pair of earth/heaven - new ideas etc can disturb the status-quo.

33 Retreat, Draw-in, Trick - wind - the focus on wind is on cultivation and so 'guiding' where that can include the drawing-in of the 'enemy' to interact on MY terms. The retreat is planned, well-structured, and as such reflects an intent to draw-in rather than mindless fleeing a quantitatively superior 'force'. As such there is a sense of 'blowing' the enemy into where you want them to go (guiding the sails of their ships etc)

62 Portraying - water - the focus in 62 is on unconditional loyalty to the collective, That loyalty is a form of control, which is well-covered in the associations of containment/control with water.

20 admiring - mountain - someone/thing to look UP to, that stands out as an example, to be an example, to stand tall. Refinement of the generic quality leads us into the negative of being made an example of (a form of control rather than passive motivation as compared to 34s active motivation)

02 Earth - earth

The wave patterns that bring these out reflect a LACK in resolution where the particular hexagrams serve as analogy/metaphor for the quality covered where that quality is 'in' each of the trigrams.

All of the other patterns are 'superpositions', MANY hexagrams map to the one space. The above are the only ones that are constant, and so reflect a qualitative constancy through different forms of representations.

Chris.
 

lightofdarkness

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A diagram to cover the point re generic/precise meanings etc - the trigram (left) reflects the coiled-up meanings represented in the hexagram (centre) that reflects the coiled-up meanings represented in the dodecagram (right).

There are 64 possible trigram representations (with moving lines) as there are 4096 hexagram representations (with moving lines). Each higher level is the AND to the lower level that is XOR - and so we move from approximate/vague/concentrated forms to the precise, crisp, differentiated forms.

In that movement across 9 levels of recursion (trigrams to dodecagrams), the mentioned 8 qualities remain constant - they just become more 'refined', more differentiated as we go deeper.


4654.jpg
 
B

bruce_g

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One image by itself does nothing.

If it takes two images to make a relationship (cause/effect, interaction, etc.), then that can be done with either two trigrams (to make a hexagram) or two hexagrams, to make the relation. Could it be that the origin began with two complete images or hexagrams, and that it was later divided into trigrams to make interaction-ary each hexagram by itself?

Perhaps it began without hexagrams or trigrams, but with only (father) sky and (mother) earth. (I realize that the official yin/yang came later.) Then, fire, water and wind. Still later adding mountain, lake? This progression matches the seniority of trigrams: eldest, middle, youngest sons and daughters.

(from earliest to latest)

father sky
mother earth
thunder eldest son (in the beginning was the word)
wind eldest daughter (carries the word)
middle son water
middle daughter fire
youngest son mountain
youngest daughter lake

It seems like a natural progression in terms of evolution: starting with the largest archetype and moving toward less essential elements.

Whenever I ponder which came first: the hexagram/trigram question, I see the beginning scene in 2001, A Space Odyssey, when, the primate man incidentally hit a bone with the larger bone club he held in his hand, catapulting the small bone high into the air. The first conscious observation of cause, effected by his own action or force. It must have seemed supernatural to him at the time; his enthusiasm over the discovery was obvious. ?Hey fellas, check this out! Let?s give it a name!?
 

lightofdarkness

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You can make any sequence of trigrams generate meaning. As you can any sequence of hexagrams, that because they REPRESENT qualities used to communicate internal states - feelings - that allow for resonance. THEN comes finer distinctions in the form of labels where LOCAL context allows you to relabel universals to fit some local event etc.

Furthermore, the more archetypal nature preceded father/mother, we focus on light/dark and their battles. When you bring darkness 'around' to be placed next to light so they cooperate rather than compete. (the light/dark focus is more STRUCTURAL than temporal in that the focus on eternity and immortality impoverish time issues)

the point here is that when push gives way to shove so the cooperative can become increasingly competitive. IOW the indicated 'ground' state is of a manic sense to survive in a hostile, unpredictable, environment. (reptiles cover this level of living where offspring compete with each other and their parents etc)

AS such the light/dark focus is on autonomous units, archetypes, caught in an infinite number of battles in an eternal war. Purity rules - immortality rules. BUT so does an increase in sterility/decadence.

the need for 'fresh blood' allows for a break-down in a focus on purity, now recognisable as being a hinderance in a universe that demands diversity if you want to develop. As such, the competitiveness gives way to an increase in cooperation - eventually the success of genetic diversity, of mixing, ensures long term survival at a cost - the loss of immortality. As such the archetypal light/dark gives way to the more typal male/female dynamic and with it the emphasis on birth/death.

Biologically, this immortality/mortality focus is reflected in the development of meiosis from meitosis, difference in replication from sameness in replication (or more so sexual replication from asexual/adrogonous replication -IOW BEFORE male/female comes a whole realm of replication that needs to be included/considered in any analysis of meaning derivation etc in that it still influences (e.g. skin develops by meitosis etc)

In the process of male/female development a 'new' opposite pair emerges - wind/thunder where their 'emergence' factor introduces a destablising element to the 'security' focus of any heaven/earth relationship. (in your family model so the eldest children can be a source of as 'new' paradigm etc that can compete with the parents etc)

The qualities covered at the level of universals are equivalent to letters in the spoken/written level of communications but are 'whole' in that they are 'immediate' more so than letters can be. At the same time we can also link them together.

PRIOR to our consciousness is the oscillations of our species brain and IT will automatically derive 2^n qualities from that oscillation alone. Conservation of energy will then recruit qualities derived in analysis A as sources of analogy/metaphor to deal with analysis B - THAT development allows for ONE set of qualities to be repeatedly used in an infinite number of contexts through the use of relabelling - as we find possible using the IC.

That set of universals, a 'regular' network - is a root of meaning in our neurology but is unconscious and so at the level of consciousness we are still discovering things - but particular things (ad hoc development) and so 'small world' networks develop.

the binary sequence development is 'natural' in that there is no need for 'intent' or 'mediation' in its development. All other sequences are then derivable from that basic sequence in that they are contained within it.

That said, due to the regular network relationships, you can start anywhere and 'see' the whole, given time - but some paths allow for quicker access to things than do other paths (however the slower paths may offer aspects not covered in detail/depth by the quicker paths etc)

Given a few million years of neurological/cognitive development, so these patterns are hard coded but as POTENTIALS - LOCAL context, and that included individuals, will then actualise the patterns, 'discover' them and so find meaning in the patterns and develop confidence in those patterns such that they become the 'preferred' patterns to be used in interpretations.

IOW the WHOLE contains all possible methods of interpretations etc and local biases then extract some particular. What we as conscious individuals are discovering is the size, the scope, of that whole.

Chris.
 

heylise

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I post Han Boering's idea about the doubling of trigrams. No time right now to explain anything, but maybe the pictures are clear enough.
4656.gif

at the top the original trigram. When it changes to another one (row at left) you find the hexagram at the crossline.
4657.gif


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heylise

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Oops, that is the picture when a trigram is the 'change' between two hexagrams, but I guess it also explains how to get a hexagram from a trigram. Then go from the trigram to the right. An old line doubles into the duogram for old yang or yin, a young (unchanging) line to the duogram of young yang/yin.

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lightofdarkness

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The referenced square/circle representations reflect the 'dimension of precision' we operate through in XOR/AND dynamics. As we move through time a cycle is a circle but as it moves through time so it forms a spiral. That 'circular' spiral becomes increasingly a 'square' spiral as you move from AND states (all is integrated) to XOR states (a focus on differentiating).

See the "dimension of precision" page in the IDM work if you are interested.

http://www.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/idm006.html

It is possible this is the source of the notion of 'squaring the circle'.

Chris.
 

hilary

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'Possibly relevant' - nice one, Lindsay. I'm finding it very hard to visualise this thing from the descriptions, which don't say what is inscribed on the jade. Does anyone know of a picture?
 

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