Li

Li is one of the eight trigrams (bagua) of the Yijing. It is composed of two yang lines enclosing a single broken yin line at the centre, and its attribute is Fire, the Clinging, associated with light, clarity, beauty, and that which depends on what it feeds upon, as flame clings to its fuel. In the family symbolism it is the Middle Daughter, and its polarity is yin. Its associated element is Fire, and in the Later Heaven arrangement of the bagua its direction is due south. Each of the eight trigrams combines with another to form the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yijing. These are the conventions of the Chinese cosmological and divinatory tradition, in which Li, bright and clinging, is the natural counterpart of the trigram Kan, the abyss of water.

In the Earlier Heaven or Fu Xi arrangement, an older and more static ordering of the eight trigrams than the Later Heaven sequence used for compass direction above, Li stands in the east rather than the south. Li's brightness has a practical afterlife in feng shui: the octagonal bagua mirror hung above doorways to deflect unfavourable influences carries all eight trigrams around its rim, generally in the Later Heaven sequence though some mirrors use the Earlier Heaven order instead, and the same eight trigram ring, in both sequences, appears on the face of the Luopan, the compass used to orient buildings by direction.

Sources Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in ChinaRichard J. Smith with The I Ching, or Book of ChangesRichard Wilhelm (trans.); Cary F. Baynes (English trans.), The Five "Confucian" ClassicsMichael Nylan

Li stands in the east in the Earlier Heaven arrangement attributed to Fuxi, opposite Kan in the west. In the Later Heaven arrangement attributed to King Wen it moves to the south, and this is the position most readers will meet first, since Later Heaven is the order used by the classical commentators and by the compass schools of feng shui.

The southern placement is the clearest illustration of what the Later Heaven order is doing. That arrangement is organised around the year and the phases rather than around symmetry, so the trigram of fire and light belongs at the height of summer and at the quarter of the greatest heat. In Chinese orientation the south is also the direction a ruler faces, which puts Li at the front of the diagram as it is conventionally drawn.

In the Later Heaven order Li is the phase Fire outright, the only trigram to hold that phase alone. From the Shuogua it takes the pheasant among animals, for the brilliance of the plumage, and the eye among the parts of the body, since sight depends on light in the way the trigram's attribute of clinging depends on what it feeds on. In the family scheme Li is the middle daughter.

The two arrangements place Li ninety degrees apart, which is the sharpest reminder available that a bagua diagram means nothing until you know which order it follows.

Sources Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in ChinaRichard J. Smith with The I Ching, or Book of ChangesRichard Wilhelm (trans.); Cary F. Baynes (English trans.), The Five "Confucian" ClassicsMichael Nylan