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I Ching trigrams
The eight trigrams
Three lines, solid or broken, in eight possible arrangements. The bagua is the vocabulary the whole system is written in: every hexagram is two of these stacked, and every trigram carries an image, a family role, an element, a direction and a season.
- 8
- trigrams
- 3
- lines each
- 64
- hexagrams built from them
The eight
Two parents and their six children, in the order the classic introduces them. Each entry lists the trigram's correspondences and the sixteen hexagrams it appears in.
☰
Heaven
乾 · Qián
Metal
The father
Three unbroken lines. Pure yang: the sky that never stops turning, and the drive that starts things.
☷
Earth
坤 · Kūn
Earth
The mother
Three broken lines. Pure yin: ground that carries whatever is set on it, and the patience to do so.
☳
Thunder
震 · Zhèn
Wood
The eldest son
One yang line pushing up under two yin. Thunder: the jolt that starts motion after stillness.
☴
Wind
巽 · Xùn
Wood
The eldest daughter
One yin line entering beneath two yang. Wind and wood: what gets in by being persistent rather than forceful.
☵
Water
坎 · Kǎn
Water
The middle son
One yang line trapped between two yin. Water in a gorge: risk, depth, and the discipline they demand.
☲
Fire
離 · Lí
Fire
The middle daughter
One yin line held between two yang. Fire: brightness that only exists as long as it has something to burn.
☶
Mountain
艮 · Gèn
Earth
The youngest son
One yang line resting on two yin. Mountain: the stop at the end of movement, and the boundary that makes a place.
☱
Lake
兌 · Duì
Metal
The youngest daughter
One yin line resting on two yang. Lake: an open surface, and the pleasure of things freely exchanged.
What a trigram is
A trigram is three lines stacked one above another, each solid or broken, counted from the bottom. Three lines with two states give eight arrangements, and those eight are the bagua: the complete vocabulary of the system. Every hexagram is one trigram set above another, so the sixty-four figures are eight by eight.
Two of the trigrams are unmixed. Qián is three solid lines and Kūn is three broken ones, and the classic treats them as the parents. The other six are made by placing a single odd line into one of those two, and they are named as sons and daughters according to which line is the odd one out: the bottom line gives the eldest child, the middle the second, the top the youngest.
The correspondences
Each trigram carries a set of associations built up over centuries: a natural image, an attribute, a family position, one of the five phases, a compass direction, a season, an animal and a part of the body. These are not decorative. A great deal of traditional practice, from Wen Wang Gua to feng shui, works by reading those correspondences off the trigrams in a figure.
The directions given here follow the Later Heaven arrangement, which is the one used for most divinatory and geomantic work. An older Earlier Heaven arrangement puts the trigrams in a different circle, pairing each with its exact opposite, and is more often used cosmologically than practically.
Reading a trigram inside a hexagram
Position matters. The upper trigram is the outer, public, later half of the situation; the lower is the inner, private, earlier half. A hexagram made of danger over stillness reads quite differently from stillness over danger, which is the difference between hexagram 39 and hexagram 52's neighbours.
The two trigrams are also read as relating to each other. Fire under a lake destroys, and gives hexagram 49, Revolution. Fire over a lake simply diverges, and gives hexagram 38, Opposition. Learning the eight is what makes the sixty-four legible rather than something to be memorised.
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