





















The Cosmos in the I Ching -

The Yi-globe

Magyar oldal A study on the traditional (King Wen's) sequence of the sixty-four hexagrams "In the last analysis the world ... is a cosmos, not a chaos.

This belief is the foundation of Chinese philosophy,

as of all philosophy." (R. Wilhelm / C. Baynes tr.) The Yi-globe is a relatively new configuration in the history of the I Ching (Yijing, Book of Changes)[*]. It is a spherical structure constructed from the 64 hexagrams, and as such, in all probability, it represented the Chinese cosmology in the mythical past. This arrangement of the hexagrams perfectly reflects the image of the world: as Chinese people imagined the origin, the make-up, and the operation of the universe sometime before the first millennium BC. This latent (perhaps secret or purposely hidden, or simply lost or forgotten) cosmic order is fully revealed and reconstructed in this study. The whole work is based on the words of the I Ching, and can be verified easily by reading the book. The three-dimensional arrangement puts the hexagrams in a new perspective. In this form new light is thrown on the whole I Ching, and its true meaning will be illuminated. Thus, all the readers of the I Ching - the adherents of Taoism in the first place - can get new, specific information from here. The practitioners can gain a reliable basis for the interpretation of the hexagrams, especially in divination. In addition to the description of the cosmos, the Yi-globe also resolves two much-discussed questions: Why were the hexagrams arranged in the I Ching in the known specific order? Where did the King Wen's sequence originate? The Yi-globe

Version 2009 (.html)



Contents with subtitles

Synopsis

Introduction

The reconstruction of the Yi-globe

The analysis of the Yi-globe

The Yi-globe and the microcosm

The origin of the KW sequence

The analogues of the Yi-globe



News, Q&A, Addenda

Contact The Yi-globe

Version 2011 (.pdf) This is a revised and rewritten version of the previous html text.



Important note (in 2018): In the course of the last years, studying the old Chinese diagrams, I have learned that the King Wen sequence might not originate in the Yi-globe in the way, as it was supposed in this article. The advanced theory on this subject can be found in a new site (see below).























