The Sage Who Devised the Trigrams

Fuxi is one of the great culture heroes of Chinese tradition, a legendary sage-ruler counted among the Three Sovereigns of the mythical dawn of civilization and credited with founding the arts of settled human life. To him tradition ascribes the invention of hunting and fishing and the domestication of animals, the institution of marriage, and above all the devising of the eight trigrams (bagua), the basic figures underlying the divinatory system of the Yijing (I Ching), which he is said to have derived from patterns observed in the natural world, from the markings of a dragon-horse or the order of heaven and earth.

In much of the tradition he is paired with the goddess Nuwa, as consort or sibling, the two depicted with intertwined serpent-tails and holding the compass and the set-square, emblems of the ordering of the world. Like the other culture heroes, Fuxi belongs to legendary rather than documented history, and his figure gathers up a people's account of how civilization and its fundamental patterns first began.