Another Legend similar to the I Ching origins is one where Fu-hsi was meditating by the River Lo, when a tortoise or a turtle emerged. He studied the markings on its shell, which revealed pattern on it’s back. One with nine squares having marking inside each one. The markings in each square that when added in a row of three in any direction equaled 15.
The Lo Shu square is viewed as a harmonious blend of 9 archetypal principles of numbers and a cosmological plan of time and space that reflects the order of the universe. Such importance was laid on this configuration, that it was used as the ground plan for the nine palaces of the Emperor. As the intermediary between heaven and earth, he mirrored this cosmic plan by living and circulating around these palaces during the year. The plan was extended to the design of the capital city itself, with Old Peking at the centre and having eight avenues of access – symbolically the centre of the Middle Kingdom of the world. Today the square plays an intrinsic part in the geomantic art of Feng Shui.
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Read more:
- Symbols of Chinese Cardinal Directions
- Feng Shui
- In Chinese divination philosophy, the tortoise is the foundation of the cycle of creation – birth, life, death and rebirth
- 8 Trigrams & 64 Hexigrams became a discovery of something implicit in the cosmic order
These 8 trigrams are the building blocks of 64 hexagrams that display every possible combination of these lines. It was the first of these sequences that led the 17th century father of calculus, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to discover the functioning of the binary system. A Jesuit priest, who was based in China, showed the configuration to Leibniz, who investigated further and discovered that if the value of 0 were attributed to each solid line, and the value of 1 to each broken line, it would give the binary notation for the numbers 0 through to 63. The uncovering of the binary code allowed Leibniz to change the path of mathematics for all time. The I Ching is therefore the earliest known example of binary notation, this being the smallest complete arithmetic number system as well as the language that enables computers to work.
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