Jing Fang's Eight Palaces
Paths on the hypercube, described in the 2nd century BCE
Tap a house in the table to see which lines separate it from the pure hexagram of its palace.
Jing Fang (78–37 BCE) ordered the 64 hexagrams into 8 palaces. Each palace is born from a pure hexagram (a trigram repeated above and below) and begets 7 descendants by changing lines in a fixed order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, one line per step. Then the wandering soul (游魂) reverts line 4, and the returning soul (歸魂) recovers the lower trigram of origin.
Translated into bits, it is a directed walk over the hypercube Q6. And something remarkable happens: the 8 × 8 = 64 hexagrams all come out different. The palaces partition the whole set, without planning it with set theory.
There is also a bridge to another Han system: the 12 sovereign hexagrams of the calendar are exactly the first 6 generations of the palace of Qian and the 6 of Kun (6 and 6; zero in the other 6 palaces), a theorem the suite asserts.
本宮 Pure | 一世 1st generation | 二世 2nd generation | 三世 3rd generation | 四世 4th generation | 五世 5th generation | 游魂 Wandering soul | 歸魂 Returning soul | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
☰Qian Heaven | ||||||||
☳Zhen Thunder | ||||||||
☵Kan Water | ||||||||
☶Gen Mountain | ||||||||
☷Kun Earth | ||||||||
☴Xun Wind | ||||||||
☲Li Fire | ||||||||
☱Dui Lake |
Each row is a palace; each column, a stage of the generation. The last column (returning soul) changes only line 5 with respect to the pure hexagram, hence the jump of 3 lines in the profile 1·1·1·1·1·1·3.
the palace in its original state.
Jing Fang's eight houses partition the 64 hexagrams without repeating any, generated by successive line changes from the eight pure hexagrams.
verificar_palaciosThe system of the Eight Palaces (bagong) is attributed to Jing Fang, with the order Qian, Zhen, Kan, Gen, Kun, Xun, Li, Dui and the generations pure, first to fifth world, wandering soul (you hun) and returning soul (gui hun).
The types of claim and the full bibliography (APA) are in Foundations.