i ching_landscape.pdf

The I Ching Landscape.

By D.H. Van den Berghe

This article builds on my earlier work on the tradional order of the I Ching.

"The explanation of King Wen's order of the 64 hexagrams":

(http://www.fourpillars.net/pdf/kingwen.pdf)

The article uncovered some very basic structures found in the hexagram order, but also

concluded that King Wen has likely taken inspiration from a kind of landscape when he

constructed this order.

This was based on apparent arranged orders involving Water, Mountain and Lake trigrams

respectively.

The following diagrams summarize this "landscape":

Based on the arrangement of hexagrams depicting sunrises in different seasons of the year,

we also have evidence that we are probably facing towards the East in this landscape:

In these sunrises, the season is indicated by the lower trigram, according to the well-known

Later Heaven arrangement of the trigrams:

Each of these sunrises are correctly placed in the landscape facing East.

There happen to be exactly 18 hexagram pairs going from Hex29/30 (summer solstice) till

Hex63/64 (winter solstice), that means 36 hexagrams.

This would assign about 10 days to each hexagram, or three hexagrams per Chinese Month.

Projecting the sunrise hexagram positions on the full year cycle we get this result:

Hex35 falls in the end of Wei/Goat Month, correctly indicating end of Summer.

Hex38 is right at the beginning of Shen/Monkey Month, which is considered start of Autumn.

Hex56 is exactly at the beginning of Yin/Tiger Month, which marks the end of Winter and start

of the New Year.

Hex50 is at the beginning of Mao/Rabbit Month, which corresponds to full Spring.

Both solstices (Hex30 and Hex64) are also in their proper place.

*****

One of the most frequent type question I received after publishing this explanation of the

order was: "Where can this landscape possibly be? Where did King Wen sit when he saw

this?... "

Initially I thought it would be unlikely to find this place (if it existed), since China is such a big

country.

And what would it prove?

Probably a lot of places would be suitable candidates...

Is it an idealised landscape, or does it really exist somewhere?

So, I never really looked for 'the place'.. until recently when I saw a topographic map of

China.

Map of China.

In the days of Zhou dynasty the territory of China was a lot smaller than it is today.

Borders changed frequently because of feudal wars, but the country roughly stretched from

the Yellow River valley in the North up till the river Yangtse in the South.