“What we term Completion [Tetragram 73] is enduring achievements that cannot be changed.”
(Yang Xiong, The Canon of Supreme Mystery ( 太玄經 ),
Many people read or at least have heard of the classic Chinese treatises known as the Zhou Yi (Yi Jing) and the Tai Xuan Jing. Legend and history disagree about the authorship of the first, the extraordinary book based on the binary combinations of broken (yin) and unbroken (yang) lines. These combinations form a very complex series of 64 hexagrams. The second book, with a series of 81 figures, was written by Yang Xiong (born 53 B.C., died 18 A.D.).
Yang, a noted scholar of the Chinese Han Dynasty, combined Confucian and Daoist philosophical principles, building on the Zhou Yi (Yi Jing), to produce a complex and intriguing book. Different from the Yi Jing, Yang’s book used a ternary numbering base (the lines are unbroken, once and twice broken, to signify Heaven, Earth and Man, respectively). The combinations of numbers were arranged in the form of a counting sequence starting comprising a total of 81 tetragrams. Also different from the Yi Jing, the sequence is straightforward, consisting of a direct, increasing count of the base numbers.
The book is not difficult to read, but it’s full depth escapes the reader who lacks other references, in particular regarding the social, philosophical and political context of the Han period. Even without such knowledge though, use of the book is straightforward albeit different from the normal interpretation methods that have grown around the Yi Jing. The Tai Xuan Jing can be read as a calendar of the Chinese agricultural year, for example, with numerous references to the weather of each stage of the seasons and the natural life-cycles.
For the definitive source on the Tai Xuan Jing I refer the reader to Ms. Michael Nylan’s translation, with introduction, commentaries and notes, under the title “The Canon of Supreme Mystery”, published in 1993 by State University of New York.
The “tetragrams” presented here are generated by means of a JS program. Nothing is particularly remarkable about the implementation; for example, the random number generator is the standard browser one—adequate for reflection, though a fortune-teller might demand better odds. Just looking at this page, the reader will understand that recreating the Tai Xuan Jing was not my goal in this case though. Instead, I wanted to show how an appropriate number system (in this case Base-4 and not 3) and systematic arrangement of the commentaries, yields a convincing stream of images “on the path of the Tai Xuan Jing”. Caveat: this “system” is definitely not comparable with either the Zhou I or the Tai Xuan Jing. It is not a tool for divination, and the reader should not “use” it for any decisions, especially not to try and figure out what will happen in the future or what occult events happened in the past.
At a different level, though, it is interesting to note that this system just explores a numerical series (a “count”) as the Tai Xuan Jing does, in a way much less mysterious than that of the I Ching. It is just a direct count from 0 to 255 in base four. The system also draws the tetragram from the top down, as Yang Xiong did in his work.
The “meanings” attached to the tetragrams here are derived from other work –for example the four causal categories I use in systems analysis. With the assistance of Anthropic’s Claude, I generated all possible combinations of four different perspectives: language, action, modality and causality. So, if there is a “meaning” it must be one the reader herself or himself “finds” in such combinations, which are sadly very far from the neat poetry and arcane judgements of both the I Ching and Yang’s “Canon”.
The system the reader can see here is different from Yang’s in another sense: while he added a third line to the ancient I Ching, to signify “man” or the “works of man”, I decided to add a fourth line type, to complement and balance the third, to represent the “product” of women and men, our “works” and materialised results. These indeed stand aside, contraposed to human society itself, derived from it, but in opposition to the same.
There is then a progression, from 64 scenarios generated by the binary combinations of the I Ching, moving on to the more complex 81 combinations of the Tai Xuan Jing, and reaching to the 256 combinations of the enhanced four-line tetragram or potentially the 65536 combinations (if we add the presence of “negative” lines, shown here in grey colour).
My experiments on these matters started early, see for example a now archived post from 2016:
http://carlos-trigoso.com/2016/12/13/octograms-2/
But I am confident now that it is enough to dwell on the tetragram and its possible sequence, as it already presents interesting and challenging details. Probably a whole life could be dedicated to write the poems or riddles to match the new tetragrams, and several lifetimes to the higher combinations, but at least there is some pleasure in imagining new landscapes opening up in the horizon, still under the light of the Classics.
I reiterate: The Tetragrams implemented in this page are just a tool for reflection and definitely should not be taken as “guidance” or “prediction”. There is a logic to these tetragrams, but the goal is to understand and learn, not to divine or look into the future.
Aside of that, I hope the kind reader values the suggestions and results here presented.