The Eight Trigrams (Bagua)

Before the sixty-four hexagrams there are eight trigrams (八卦, *bāguà*) — three-line figures that are the building blocks of the whole system. Every hexagram is two trigrams stacked, an upper and a lower, and much of a hexagram's meaning comes from the relationship between the two images.

Each trigram is three lines, yin or yang, and carries a cluster of associations — a natural image, an attribute, a family role, a direction: | Trigram | Name | Image | Attribute | Family | |---|---|---|---|---| | ☰ | Qián (乾) | Heaven | strong, creative, initiating | Father | | ☷ | Kūn (坤) | Earth | yielding, receptive, sustaining | Mother | | ☳ | Zhèn (震) | Thunder | arousing, movement, the shock that stirs | Eldest Son | | ☵ | Kǎn (坎) | Water | the abysmal, flowing, danger and depth | Middle Son | | ☶ | Gèn (艮) | Mountain | keeping still, resting, the boundary | Youngest Son | | ☴ | Xùn (巽) | Wind / Wood | gentle, penetrating, the gradual | Eldest Daughter | | ☲ | Lí (離) | Fire | clinging, light-giving, clarity | Middle Daughter | | ☱ | Duì (兌) | Lake | joyous, open, the still water that delights | Youngest Daughter | The "family" mapping is one of the tradition's elegant patterns: Heaven and Earth are father and mother, and the other six are read as their sons and daughters according to which line is the distinctive one. The trigrams also carry five-phase resonances (Qián and Duì with metal, Zhèn and Xùn with wood, Kǎn with water, Lí with fire, Kūn and Gèn with earth) used in more advanced study.

Place one trigram over another and you have a hexagram. Water (☵) over Water (☵) doubles the image of the abyss — Hexagram 29, repeated danger. Heaven (☰) over Heaven (☰) is pure creative force — Hexagram 1. Lake (☱) over Heaven is a different relation again. Reading a hexagram well begins with seeing which two images are in conversation, and how the upper (often the outer, the situation) meets the lower (often the inner, the self).

The trigrams also generate the *derived* hexagrams that advanced study explores — the nuclear figure hidden in lines two through five, and the inverse and opposite relationships that connect each hexagram to others. These are the kind of structure the serious community values, and Aurathea opens them at the Astrologer tier. For now, the eight images are the alphabet: learn them, and the sixty-four begin to read like words.