The nutrition taking of thousands of years’ Chinese culture of choosing places to live in from savagery to Shang and Zhou Dynasties by Zhou Yi is far beyond the aspects of practice conclusion, essential factors summing up and good or ill luck proving. From living in caves of mountains, looking for and building up happy family further to chasing the lucky places to be buried, they are all the basic color of pictures, which continuously stretch human’s historical life.
By watching and recording the natural phenomenon for a long period, Chinese ancestors got many benefits, which vary from the accumulation of experience on choosing living places to the form of the basic views on the whole world by connecting these images with the widely practice of human. These are usually called “universe outlook”, “world outlook” and “outlook on life”. Zhou Yi was based on these things.
According to the ancient Chinese culture records and archaeological achievements, there used to be three books which explains and symbolizes the world with trigram symbols like Zhou Yi. The three books are inheriting and developing relations. Zhou Yi is the conclusion and development of the former two books. Nowadays, the other two books have been lost, but people learnt that the meanings and orders of the trigrams in these three books are not exactly same.
In Chinese culture, Fu Xi is considered as the first person who made the Eight Diagrams. His family lived in Tian Shui District of Gansu Province. The ancient cultural relic of Da Di Wan which is 7800 years from today was confirmed as the habitation of Fu Xi’s family groups. The legend that Fu Xi drew the Eight Diagrams is popular in this area and the historical relics of Gua Tai Mountain (Fu Xi made the Eight Diagrams according to the geographic situation of this mountain) are also located here. Someone then deduced the reliability that Fu Xi’s family group firstly made the Eight Diagrams. But the first thing we should pay attention to is the picture of Eight Diagrams. The trigrams in this picture represent mountains. The secret of this picture lays on its implied meaning. Sun rises from one side of the mountain and goes down from the other side of the mountain; water flows down from the top of the mountain and gathered on the foot of the mountain; winter passes and spring comes; yin alternates with yang in the mountain; flowers come out and wither; coldness replaces hotness again and again around the mountain and even humans who are living beside the mountain are involved with this circulation from beginning to end. This shows that the mountain is the beginning of people’s life as well as the end of life. To sum up, this picture is actually a “picture of Fengshui”, which shows the general view of our ancestors on universe and human life.
According to the ancient Chinese culture records of Shiji (a historical book recorded history before Han Dynasty written by Sima Qian), there is a Chinese culture story that Ji Chang, King Wen of Zhou Dynasty, performed Zhou Yi when he was in the prison of King Zhou of Shang Dynasty. An expert, Zhou Shan explained the word “Perform” with four contents: firstly, he revised the names of the 64 divinatory symbols; secondly, Ji Chang rearranged and edited the meaning of every divinatory symbol; thirdly, he reordered the 64 divinatory symbols and fourthly, he finally gave the name “Zhou Yi” to this book.
From the comparison of the three books of “易” and two pictures of Eight Diagrams, we can see that all the diagrams can be transformed according to a certain law, which is caused by the law that everything and every phenomenon will change due to the interaction of contrariety of yin and yang. This law is the so-called “易” (“change” in English). Everything will change, but the law that drives things to change circularly will not change.
In conclusion, according to the close relation between the three “易”, the form or the arrangement of the symbol system and the general structure of Zhou Yi all definitely took nutrition from the culture of Fengshui.