Where the Compass Arrangements Came From

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.