Yintelligence^TM: The Mapping of the Pre-Heaven or FuXi Hexagrams to the Post-Heaven or King Wen Hexagrams

The Yijing易經belongs to the famous group of the five classics. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Four Books and Five Classics四書五經 were the subject of mandatory study by those Confucian scholars who wished to become government officials. The Yijing (Faure & Javary, 2002) consists of 64 figures called hexagrams 卦 formed by six Yin (broken) or Yang (unbroken) lines and commentaries on each of these hexagrams and their lines. The whole set of the hexagrams and their interdependencies make a dynamic model for the understanding or the anticipating of the different steps change goes through. The Yijing does not predict the future but gives a snap-shot of the actual situation and the holistic potentialities which may be deployed or not in order to better adapt to the on-going change. The different stages of a change are explained by the Yin-Yang polarity and the never-ending transformation of old-Yin 老陰in young-Yang少陽, old-Yang老陽, young-Yin少陰 and old-Yin again. The 64 hexagrams are built by pairing the 8 basic trigrams obtained by adding to each bigram a supplementary Yin or Yang line. Figure 1 depicts a 4-regions space (East/young Yang, South /old Yang, West/young Yin, North/old Yin) and a cyclic movement. A forthcoming article will explain the relation between this space organization and the whole set of 64 hexagrams as a network. The cyclic change is of major interest. Purpose: The 64 hexagrams of the Yijing are organized in 16 “first degree” nuclear families (Javary, 1997), which may be consolidated in 4 “second degree” nuclear families. There are another 16 families organizing the 64 hexagrams in a different structure. In the literature they are called the pre-heaven先天 hexagrams (Schlumberger, 1987), and in this paper they are referred to as the FuXi伏羲 hexagrams. They form 16 cyclic families, whose structure will be analyzed in this paper. This cyclicity induces a “predecessor-successor” relationship between the hexagrams belonging to the same FuXi family: H1→H2→H3→H4→H1. While the 4 members of each nuclear family are centered on a “master” hexagram that corresponds to a common inner lines’ structure, each FuXi family is cyclically structured and we call the hexagrams belonging to the