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Concept
Bagua
Summary
The bagua (pinyin) or pa-kua (Wade-Giles) (八卦) are a set of eight symbols that originated in China, used in Daoist / Taoist cosmology to represent the fundamental principles of reality, seen as a range of eight interrelated concepts. Each consists of three lines, each line either "broken" or "unbroken", respectively representing yin or yang. Due to their tripartite structure, they are often referred to as Eight Trigrams in English.
The trigrams are related to Yijing and Taiji philosophy, and the Wuxing, or "five elements". The trigrams have correspondences in astronomy, divination, meditation, astrology, geography, geomancy (fengshui), anatomy, decorative arts, the family, martial arts (particularly taijiquan and baguazhang), Chinese medicine and elsewhere.
The bagua can appear singly or in combination, and are commonly encountered in two different arrangements: the Primordial (先天八卦), "Earlier Heaven", or "Fu Xi" bagua (伏羲八卦) and the Manifested (後天八卦), "Later Heaven", or "King Wen" bagua.
In the ancient Chinese classic, I Ching (Pinyin: Yi Jing), two trigrams are stacked together to create a six-line figure known as a hexagram. There are 64 possible permutations. The 64 hexagram figures and their texts make up the book. The trigram symbolism can be used to interprete the hexagram figure and text. An example from Hexagram 19 commentary: "The earth [kun trigram] above the lake [dui trigram]: The image of Approach. Thus the superior man is inexhaustibe in his will to teach, and without limits in his tolerance and protection of the people." The trigrams have been used to organize Yijing charts as seen below.
There are eight possible combinations to render the various trigrams ( bāguà):
Book of Changes listed two sources for the eight trigrams. The chapter explains the first source thus:
This explanation would later be modified to:
The Limitless (Wuji) produces the delimited, and this is the Absolute (Taiji). The Taiji produces two forms, named Yin and Yang.
Official source
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