The Luoshu (

pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...

), Lo Shu ( Wade-Giles), or Nine Halls Diagram is an ancient Chinese diagram and named for the Luo River near

Luoyang Luoyang is a city located in the confluence area of Luo River (Henan), Luo River and Yellow River in the west of Henan province. Governed as a prefecture-level city, it borders the provincial capital of Zhengzhou to the east, Pingdingshan to the ...

Henan Henan (; or ; ; alternatively Honan) is a landlocked province of China, in the central part of the country. Henan is often referred to as Zhongyuan or Zhongzhou (), which literally means "central plain" or "midland", although the name is al ...

. The Luoshu appears in

myths Myth is a folklore genre consisting of Narrative, narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or Origin myth, origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not Objectivity (philosophy), ...

concerning the

invention An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an i ...

writing Writing is a medium of human communication which involves the representation of a language through a system of physically Epigraphy, inscribed, Printing press, mechanically transferred, or Word processor, digitally represented Symbols (semiot ...

Cangjie Cangjie () is a legendary ancient Chinese figure said to have been an official historian of the Yellow Emperor and the inventor of Chinese characters. Legend has it that he had four eyes, and that when he invented the characters, the deities an ...

and other

culture hero A culture hero is a mythological hero specific to some group ( cultural, ethnic, religious, etc.) who changes the world through invention or discovery. Although many culture heroes help with the creation of the world, most culture heroes are imp ...

es. It is a unique normal

magic square In recreational mathematics, a square array of numbers, usually positive integers, is called a magic square if the sums of the numbers in each row, each column, and both main diagonals are the same. The 'order' of the magic square is the number ...

of order three. It is usually paired with the River Map or Hetunamed in reference to the

Yellow River The Yellow River or Huang He (Chinese: , Standard Beijing Mandarin, Mandarin: ''Huáng hé'' ) is the second-longest river in China, after the Yangtze River, and the List of rivers by length, sixth-longest river system in the world at th ...

and used with the River Map in various contexts involving Chinese geomancy,

numerology Numerology (also known as arithmancy) is the belief in an occult, divine or mystical relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events. It is also the study of the numerical value, via an alphanumeric system, of the letters in ...

philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...

, and early

natural science Natural science is one of the branches of science concerned with the description, understanding and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and repeatab ...

Traditions

The Lo Shu is part of the legacy of ancient Chinese mathematical and divinity (cf. the

I Ching The ''I Ching'' or ''Yi Jing'' (, ), usually translated ''Book of Changes'' or ''Classic of Changes'', is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zho ...

) traditions, and is an important emblem in '' Feng Shui'' ()—the art of

geomancy Geomancy (Greek: γεωμαντεία, "earth divination") is a method of divination that interprets markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed handfuls of soil, rocks, or sand. The most prevalent form of divinatory geomancy invo ...

concerned with the placement of objects in relation to the flow of qi (), or "natural energy".

History

A Chinese legend concerning the pre-historic Emperor Yu () tells of the Lo Shu, often in connection with the ''Yellow River Map'' (Hetu) and the

eight trigrams The bagua or pakua (八卦) are a set of eight symbols that originated in China, used in Taoist cosmology to represent the fundamental principles of reality, seen as a range of eight interrelated concepts. Each consists of three lines, each lin ...

. In ancient China there is a legend of a huge

deluge A deluge is a large downpour of rain, often a flood. The Deluge refers to the flood narrative in the Biblical book of Genesis. Deluge may also refer to: History *Deluge (history), the Swedish and Russian invasion of the Polish-Lithuanian Comm ...

: the people offered sacrifices to the god of one of the flooding rivers, the Luo river (), to try to calm his anger. A magical

turtle Turtles are an order of reptiles known as Testudines, characterized by a special shell developed mainly from their ribs. Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Cryptodira (hidden necked tu ...

emerged from the water with the curiously unnatural Lo Shu pattern on its shell: circular dots representing the integers one through nine are arranged in a three-by-three grid. Early records dated to 650 BCE are ambiguous, referring to a "river map", but clearly start to refer to a

by 80 CE, and explicitly give an example of one since 570 CE. Recent publications have provided support that the Lo Shu Magic Square was an important model for time and space. It served as a basis for city planning, and tomb and temple design. The magic square was incidentally used to designate spaces of political and religious importance. Carus-p48-Mystic-table

The layout

The odd and even numbers alternate in the periphery of the Lo Shu pattern; the four even numbers are at the four corners, and the five odd numbers (which outnumber the even numbers by one) form a cross in the center of the square. The sums in each of the three rows, in each of the three columns, and in both diagonals, are all 15.15 is the number of days in each of the 24 cycles of the Chinese solar year. Since "5" is in the center cell, the sum of any two other cells that are directly through the five from each other must be 10 (e.g., opposite squares and corners add up to 10, the number of the ''Yellow River Map''.

In numerology

The Lo Shu is sometimes connected numerologically with the "

Bagua The bagua or pakua (八卦) are a set of eight symbols that originated in China, used in Taoist cosmology to represent the fundamental principles of reality, seen as a range of eight interrelated concepts. Each consists of three lines, each lin ...

" ( or eight

trigrams Trigrams are a special case of the ''n''-gram, where ''n'' is 3. They are often used in natural language processing for performing statistical analysis of texts and in cryptography for control and use of ciphers and codes. Frequency Context is ...

"), that can be arranged in the eight outer cells, reminiscent of circular trigram diagrams. Because north is placed at the bottom of maps in China, the 3x3

having number 1 at the bottom and 9 at the top is used in preference to the other rotations/reflections. As seen in the "Later Heaven" arrangement, 1 and 9 correspond with ☵ Kǎn "Water " and ☲ Lí "Fire " respectively. In the "Early Heaven" arrangement, they would correspond with ☷ Kūn "Earth " and ☰ Qián "Heaven " respectively. Like the ''Yellow River Map'', the Lo Shu square, in conjunction with the Bagua, is sometimes used as a mandalic representation important in Feng Shui geomancy.

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

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External links

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Lo Shu Square: Definition, Nature and History
{{authority control Chinese folk religion Numerology Magic squares Geomancy Divination