Shuo Gua

This wing is a list and makes no attempt to be anything else. Each of the eight trigrams is given a family position, the strong one as father and the yielding one as mother, with the remaining six as three sons and three daughters distinguished by which line differs from the others. Each is then given a direction, a season, an animal, a part of the body, a quality of action and a class of things in the world, and the lists run on for some length with no connecting argument. The absence of argument is what makes it useful. A reader who has a figure and wants to know what it can stand for consults this text, and the enumerative form is a working reference rather than a failure of composition.

Other wings supply reasoning; this one supplies vocabulary. The correspondences are not always consistent with each other, or with what other parts of the collection say about the same figures, which is what one expects from material that accumulated over time rather than being designed. Some entries look like later additions and some lists are noticeably longer than others. The atlas records the attributions as this text gives them, since later systems that use trigram correspondences, in divination, in medicine and in siting, almost always trace back to this list rather than to any independent authority.

Two circular arrangements of the eight trigrams dominate later Chinese practice, one symmetrical and contemplative, the other seasonal and directional. Both are drawn from statements in this wing: one passage describes the trigrams in terms of opposed pairs, and another describes a sequence in which activity begins in one direction and moves round through the others with the turning of the year.

The text gives the relationships in prose. It does not give a diagram. The diagrams themselves are much later. Circular charts of the trigrams and hexagrams became prominent in Song dynasty scholarship, where they were elaborated into a whole visual tradition and given attributions to legendary and dynastic founders. What is ancient is the set of statements; what is medieval is the picture everyone now recognises. That distinction matters for anything built on the arrangements. Feng shui practice, which lays the directional arrangement over a site, and the correlative cosmology that assigns each direction its trigram, phase and season, are working from a Song synthesis of an older text rather than from an unbroken ancient scheme. The atlas keeps the wing and the two arrangements as separate entries for that reason.