Fu Xi

The traditional story of the Yi Jing begins in mythic time with Fu Xi, one of the legendary Three Sovereigns and one of the great culture heroes of ancient China. He is often paired with Nüwa in stories of humanity’s earliest beginnings, including traditions in which the two survive a great flood. Fu Xi belongs to that distant age when the basic forms of civilization were first being discovered.

Tradition remembers Fu Xi above all as a watcher of patterns. By observing the recurring order of Heaven, Earth, living creatures, the human body, and the world around him, he expressed those patterns in broken and unbroken lines and formed the Ba Gua — the Eight Trigrams. Later legend connects this discovery with the mysterious River Chart, revealed by a dragon-horse emerging from the Yellow River.

The sixty-four gua in this book are built by combining those eight original forms. So, in the traditional story of how the Yi Jing came to be, Fu Xi gives the book its first language: the lines and images from which everything else grows.