Shaughnessy, page 171:

“the only organizing principle operative in the received text is that hexagrams are paired by inverting the hexagram picture… No other pattern is apparent in the sequence.”

I didn’t find any mention of this little featurette of three sets of -7s and -8s, or anything about decades at all.

Glen, are you looking at the pattern of complementary hexagrams in the Sequence? Fascinating stuff.

Best: - Glen

Yes. Isn’t it cool to have these kind of epiphanies on your own? I enjoy them a lot, my own and that of others. However, with such an old classic, with thousands of years of piled up commentaries, serious students, such as yourself (and I consider myself another one), are bound to find that somebody else in history has had similar revelations.

You made a good point, though, about a work integrating those patterns. I guess it is a matter of sitting down and start writing, rather than reading so much. I speak for myself, of course, as for all the silly snippets I drop around all the time, I’m the laziest one to seriously sitting down and write. Mind you, even if I wasn’t so lazy, I’m not sure I still have enough of the knowledge needed to pull that together…

I’m looking forward to someone building an overarching theory that will integrate all these smaller patterns. Meanwhile I’ll just keep finding the bricks…

That is correct. If you have a copy of Shaughnessy’s doctoral dissertation, “The Composition of the Zhouyi,” he discusses this observation (ch. 4, pgs 171-74). Also, Schuyler Cammann, in his article “Chinese Hexagrams, Trigrams, and the Binary System,” (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol 135, No. 4, Dec/1991) makes this comment, talking about the Wen Wang sequence:

[quote]Some scholars have assumed that certain pairs of hexagrams in this Wen Wang set may have been placed together because the meanings read from their respective lines appeared to be either complementary or contrasting. But in most cases the opposing shapes in each pair of hexagrams merely suggest possible yin-yang symbolism, with no related meanings.[/quote]

Best

L