☴ ☵ ☶ ☷
Binary · 8 trigrams
Bagua
Eight three-line figures of broken and unbroken lines — a binary code two and a half millennia early. Heaven, Lake, Fire, Thunder, Wind, Water, Mountain, Earth. Stack two and you get the 64 hexagrams of the Yijing.
- Grammar
- Three positions, each broken or unbroken: 23 = 8, with no eighth left over and no ninth possible. Lines are read bottom to top. Stack two trigrams and the same rule yields 26 = 64 hexagrams — a closed system that generates itself.
- Governance
- Ungoverned, but with two rival canonical orderings: the “Earlier Heaven” sequence and the “Later Heaven” sequence. The dispute is over order, never over membership — the eight are not in question.
- Members
- ☰ Heaven · ☱ Lake · ☲ Fire · ☳ Thunder · ☴ Wind · ☵ Water · ☶ Mountain · ☷ Earth U+2630–U+2637
§Its members
The complete set. Eight, and there cannot be a ninth.
The 64 hexagrams they stack into →
Sources · 3
- documented The Yijing with the Ten Wings; the Shuogua commentary for the trigram attributes.
- documented G. W. Leibniz, “Explication de l’arithmétique binaire”, Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 1703 — the hexagrams recognised as binary, after correspondence with Joachim Bouvet in Beijing.
- traditional The attribution of the Earlier Heaven sequence to Fu Xi — a traditional ascription to a legendary figure, not a datable act.