The provenance file on Bāguà
Provenance record 076 · Bāguà · one temple, fully accounted for.
Provenance
1. The attestation. 八卦 — "Eight trigrams". On record: Yijing (Book of Changes), Wilhelm/Baynes, I Ching, Shaughnessy, I Ching: The Classic of Changes, Lynn, The Classic of Changes.
2. The preserved evidence. a → ā (Long vowel); a → à (Stress on a) — absent from the ASCII form bagua, present in the restoration, verifiable against the sources above.
3. The narrative record. Fuxi Reads the Patterns of the World — The oldest account of the trigrams' invention is not a story about a river monster but a sentence in the Xici zhuan (Appended Statements II): 'In ancient times, when Bao Xi (Fuxi) ruled the world, he looked up and contemplated the patterns of heaven, looked down and contemplated the patterns of earth; he observed the markings of birds and beasts and the adaptations of the land. Near at hand he took patterns from his own body, far off he took them from things — and so he created the eight trigrams to communicate with the virtue of the gods and to categorize the feelings of all things. King Wen Elaborates the Changes in Prison — When King Wen of Zhou was imprisoned by the tyrant Zhòu of Shang — the tradition recorded by Sima Qian — he did not plot escape but divination: 'King Wen was imprisoned and elaborated the Zhōuyì' (Shiji 130). In captivity he doubled the eight trigrams into sixty-four hexagrams and wrote a statement for each, a one-line oracle distilled from the history and ethics of a people living under an oppressive dynasty.
4. The physical record. The Bāguà are rooted in the Shang dynasty practice of pyromancy on oracle bones and turtle plastrons, though the trigram system itself reaches written maturity in the Zhou period. The oldest Yijing manuscripts include the Mawangdui silk Zhouyi (c. 168 BCE) and the Warring States bamboo slips from Guodian and Shanghai Museum collections. Han dynasty commentaries, including the Xici, fixed the philosophical interpretation of the trigrams, while Song and Ming editions transmitted the diagrams that remain standard today.
5. The current holding. The temple at /bagua/, classified Tier 1. The restoration preserves more than the ASCII form can express — stress, length, or a letter the Latin keyboard lost — which places it, mechanically, in Tier-1.
6. The documented resonances. Astrology, Tarot & Esoteric Services, AI, Data & Predictive Intelligence, Architecture & Spatial Design — seats argued and weighted in the pattern atlas, read through the myths in this temple's Resonance File.
7. The primary sources. Tao Te Ching — the library this file answers to, open at the Sacred Texts collection.
8. The continuing record. The Bāguà are everywhere once you know how to look. The Korean flag places four of the trigrams at its corners; martial artists practice Baguazhang, the Eight Trigram Palm, walking in circles that map the directions; computer scientists and designers use the Unicode trigram block (U+2630–U+2637) as glyphs for menus and progress indicators.
At a Glance
- Restored name: Bāguà
- ASCII form: bagua
- Meaning: "Eight trigrams"
- Domain of influence: Cosmology, Divination
- Pantheon: Chinese
- Classification: Tier 1
- Original script: 八卦
- Series: The Restoration Files, No. 76 of 546
The File Continues
Read the founding dispatch for the name's full story, the Resonance File for the archetype at work — or the whole archive in one sitting.
Continue the series — previous file: Baekdusan (read it here) · next file: Baiame (read it here).
The Restoration Files are written from the same canonical record as the temples themselves: the lexicon, the lore catalog, the pattern atlas, and the cited scholarly sources. If a file ever disagrees with its temple, the temple is right — tell us, and the file will be corrected.