Trigram
What a trigram is—three yin or yang lines forming the eight building blocks of I Ching hexagrams.
1 min readJune 3, 2026
A trigram is a figure of three lines, each yin or yang. Eight trigrams combine in pairs to form the sixty-four hexagrams. In feng shui, trigrams also map to directions and natural symbols (heaven, earth, thunder, wind, water, fire, mountain, lake).
The Eight Trigrams
Each has a Chinese name and traditional attribute—for example, Qian (heaven) and Kun (earth) form the first two hexagrams when doubled.
Why It Matters
Trigrams let you see smaller patterns inside larger hexagrams. The lower trigram of a hexagram often describes inner dynamics; the upper describes outer context.