iVillage

For life as you and I live it, there is a second diagram that has evolved, historically somewhat later that the Former Heaven sequence, It is called, appropriately enough, the Later Heaven sequence, or more popularly the “Lo-Shu” diagram. It was also derived from a natural event, just like the original River Map, but this time the map was inscribed on the breast plate (some say the back) of a large tortoise that emerged from the Lo River during a flood. On the bottom of the tortoise was inscribed a series of nine numbers in a particular order. This diagram is called the Lo-Shu diagram and the inscription on the shell is that of the Magic Square, a square containing nine numbers in rows of three, all three numbers in any row adding up to 15.

The arrangement of the eight trigrams in the Later Heaven sequence comes directly from the numbers in the classic lo-shu diagram, what is called the Magic Square.

SE S SW

4 | 9 | 2

E 3 | 5 | 7 W

8 | 1 | 6

NE N NW

The Later Heaven sequence is a direct pull of these numbers (as they represent the trigrams), placing the trigram that corresponds with the number in the direction the number appears in the Magic Square or lo-shu. This assumes that the Magic Square is positioned with the “9” (trigram Li) pointing South, the “1” (trigram Kan) pointing North, “3” (trigram Zhen) pointing East, and on around.

In other words, the placement of the nine numbers in the traditional lo-shu diagram indicates which trigram governs each of the eight directions. As far as I understand, there is no other reason for this arrangement.