Heya   ,
 Starting back now with Building I-ching Blocks mixed with some of the I-ching's story. Hope you enjoy !
 Fu Xi (chinese emperor a lloonngg time ago) was the developer of the concept of the trigrams (also called gua). While sitting and doing nothing LOL, Fu Xi saw a tortoise, and the back of such tortoise revealed the trigrams concept for him. But why a tortoise and no other animal? On that time, some civilizations (most in asia) used to crash a tortoise shell, and its crack would be a form of foretelling the future (weird!!), anyways, in China, a tortoise shell, is a symbol of long life and happiness (till nobody crashes it LOL). The thing is, on such tortoise back, he noticed numbers (the dots of the tortoise shell revealed those numbers).

The sum of the numbers across, up, down, and diagonally, equalled the same number 15. Now on the center, the position of the number five is considered a magic square (also called Lo Shu), represent the earth and the five chinese elements balanced with heaven.

The other blocks around the "magic square" (or number 5), are the eight great manifestations of natural energy, those 8 squares are called Universal Chart (also called bagua, does that name recall you any mystic board software??).

After long time of decision, they decided the later heaven square (wish is that circle and the elements positions on it, and that square with the numbers and the elements).




Hope you get that well, I won't waste too much time and tomorrow I will move onto Learning I-Ching 04 Origins of the trigram concept, later on I-ching 05 I will give a brief resumeé about the 8 trigrams and we will move on to the hexagrams and how to cast em   !!
PS: Don't worry if you are not getting the yin and yang lines (when they appear alone, together, and together in 3 cause you will get that in the next chapter  

MarcoAZS looking forward for your posts  

Can't wait to see...
I didn't do to bad on my test Marco...
Thanks for the encouragement~!!!  

I was looking at the magic square and was wondering about the pattern of the elements.

Can you explain why there are 3 earth, 1 water, 1 fire, and 2 metals and 2 wood elements on the chart?

Xia-Xia Ni !!

tft

Heya ,
Great to see you in here! Excellent question !
 The central number, 5, symbolizes the earth and the number of elements or foces of nature that are in a constant state of movement (creative cycle, destructive cycle, seen on learnin I-Ching 01). It is believed that everything on earth, including human beings, are made up of a combination of the five elements, metal, water, wood, fire and earth. The central square represented the balance of earth and heaven.
do you see the circle? those in the circles are the trigrams, and the squares on the magic square, are the elements, the position of the trigram in the circle represents the position of the element in the square, so its not like if they were repeating it all, its a different trigram on the same element.
 Now... back to your question? Why those elements, why that way? Because of the location/ direction. Note that the Yu Later Heaven Lo Shu arrangement of the 8 trigrams is not very symmetrical with respect to abstract Yin-Yang binary structure,
but is very symmetrical with respect to a NorthEast-SouthWest axis and the physical representation of the 5 Elements.
The NorthEast-SouthWest axis is Earth-Earth-Earth, SouthEast and East are Wood, NorthWest and West are Metal, and
South is Fire and North is Water. hmm seems hard to understand without a picture right? let me just add one for you

I do see the balance on the diagram you sent with earth being in the center
and earth both on the southwest and north east axis.  Leaving the cycle of each element at true north, south, east and west directions.  It now makes a sense of balance to me.  

tft