The Luoshu Square, referenced from the Warring States, 475 - 221 BCE | Oriva
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The Luoshu Square, referenced from the Warring States, 475 - 221 BCEChina arrives at the same instinct entirely outside this conversation. The Luoshu is the unique three-by-three magic square: the numbers one to nine arranged so that every row, every column and both diagonals sum to fifteen. Legend gives it to Sage King Yu, who saw the pattern on the shell of a turtle rising from the Luo river.Paired with the Hetu, the Yellow River Chart, it becomes a cosmological instrument — the two diagrams used to correlate the hexagrams of the I-Ching with the universe and with human life. The earliest textual references reach back to the Warring States period; the Han read them cosmologically, and the Song Neo-Confucians built them out into a full system of generative yin and active yang.A number square as a map of how heaven and earth balance.