B is for Bagua

The Bagua is one of those things that appears very simple at first but the more you look at it, the more you learn about it, the more it just appears to be a key. Keys can be simple but unlock an awful lot! I have come across the Bagua a couple of times, reading about Feng Shui and I Ching.

In Feng Shui the idea is to generate positive energy of qi by ordering things according to the laws of Heaven and Earth. So buildings are properly designed and orientated to act within their environment, such as a famous building with a hole in it, designed according to feng shui to allow the dragon in the mountain behind access to the sea. Within homes, feng shui allows things to be placed and ordered to allow us to manage energy and create the energies we wish for and aid balance.

This image is from Wikipedia

The map that helps with this is the Bagua. Each of the eight trigrams deals with a specific concept and has certain attributes. The bagua is overlain on your house, and can be pulled into shape to match and orientated by a compass. All this is explained in any feng shui book.

The eight symbols are the basis of I Ching which is most simply understood as a method of divination. An unbroken line is Yang and a broken line is Yin and each trigram has three lines. Divination has been conducted in various ways such as with yarrow stalks or with three coins.

The bagua itself is often turned into a decoration such as a mirror. This is used on the outside of buildings as a powerful antidote to negative energies caused by the position of the building. This may be beacuse the building is at T junction with a road pointing at it; some sort of offending and badly placed structure such as a tree, electrical transformer or wall; or just because the building is attracting negative energies such as vandalism or theft.

I am beginning to see though that all this is something more than home decorating and divination - it is a system for living, just like many other sacred circles, such as the Medicine Wheel. This has taken much pointing out to me! It is philosophical and highly complex and I do not even begin to claim to understand it. This system has been around for at least 3000 years and has been developed and studied by Chinese scholars, and more recently in other countries too.

It's roots are both magical and mathematical (Math for Mystics by Renna Shesso). Emperor Yu the Great, also known as the Sage King lived around 3000BCE. One day he found a turtle by a river and recognized it as a creature of magic. The dots on it's back were clustered and of two different colours. This pattern of numbers assumed a great significance and this pattern of numbers from this turtle shell are the root of the I Ching and Feng Shui, but also the Square of Saturn and the Lo Shu (Lo River Writing).

4 9 2
3 5 7
8 1 6

The numbers form a magic square which has many mathematical tricks up it's sleeve. Each individual row and column adds up to 15 as does each diagonal. Each edge pair adds up to 10 (4 & 6, 9 & 1, 2 & 8 and 7 & 3). 5 is the only number that does not have a pair, but 5 doubled is 10 as well.

This square was used by the Mayans, prehistoric French and Northern Africans. The Babylonians used it and it was the basis for the Star of Ishtar. It was used in India for divination and associated with the planets in Islamic lands by 983 CE.

So these numbers are a key and the Bagua is one development of the key, a more sophisticated version that opens many doors. Sacred mathematics is obviously a very full and complicated subject and Ancient Civilizations were very sophisticated in it's use and it's subtelties.