The I Ching, Yin and Yang, Chinese Philosophy

The I Ching
The Book of Changes

This is the traditional diagram depicting the sixty-four hexagrams.

                                                       Propriety
              Compassion    --------     Faith ------------   Fairness

                                                       Wisdom

This Five Confucian virtues also correspond to Spring (compassion), Summer (propriety), Autumn (fairness) and Winter (wisdom). Thus are nature and humankind entwined in Chinese thought.

The Eight Trigrams

The Eight Trigrams of the I Ching are Heaven, Earth (Yin and Yang); Thunder and the Mountain, (movement and stillness); Wind and the Marsh, (penetration and dissipation); Fire and Water, (the bright and dark).

Heaven is the purely Yang; Earth the purely Yin.

Yang is movement and activity; Yin is stillness and quite. Trigrams (those three lines figures opposite) are build from the bottom up.

Solid and firm lines are Yang; open and yielding lines are Yin.

Thunder depicts a strong line beneath with two yielding above. It depicts the rising Yang . The eldest son.

The Marsh is two strong lines, with a soft line above them. The youngest daughter.

The most famous hexagram with these two combined is No.54, Marrying Maiden (better known as Little Sister Marries). Strangely it is an unfavourable hexagram. Anyone any ideas why?

...and so it goes on...

The Two Classical Methods of Display of the Trigrams
Concern the Pre-heaven and Post-Heaven
Also known as the Fuxi and King Wen Diagrams

Also the World of Ideas and World of Senses
One in Time and One in Space.

But this is also the noumena and phenomena distinction
Of Immanual Kant
Who pinched it from Leibiniz
Who got it from the Neo-Confucians
Then being translated into Latin

The World of Ideas
Inner World

The World of Sense
Outer World

Now this is deep stuff, deliberately so. Come back some time to digest it fully. You actually have to imbibe the hexagrams and trigrams and read the I Ching plus commentaries. Good luck!

The thunder to move them, the wind to scatter them; rain to moisten them, the sun to warm them. The mountain to halt them, the wetlands to pleasure them; the skies to rule over them,
the earth to sustain them.

The Shuogua (Ch.4)

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