Chess and the I-Ching
Chess and the I-Ching
Roland Matthews (2009)
Late one night while playing chess with a friend a few years ago, I wondered if the 64 squares of a chess board could be correlated to the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching. For those of you who are not familiar with chess, it is an ancient game possibly originating in India around the 6th century CE. The board is a square grid consisting of 8 rows by 8 columns resulting in a total of 64 spaces. And for those of you unacquainted with the I-Ching, it is an ancient Chinese divination system created by the Emperor Wu in 136 BCE which consists of 64 separate hexagrams symbolizing the different modes of the Tao operating through the binary forces of yin and yang. The idea came to me not necessarily because of the number 64, but because the chess set we were using had been made somewhere in Asia and had red and white pieces instead of the usual black and white seen in the West. White and red are the traditional colors associated with the tai-chi symbol of yin and yang. When placed on a black and white board, they also reveal the three colors associated with alchemy.
Each line in the I-Ching hexagram, known as a yao, is created through a type of cleromancy, or divining by random number generation. An odd number produces a solid, unbroken line and an even number creates a broken line with a space in the middle. Originally, there were 8 trigrams with only three randomly produced lines, each representing a member of an archetypal family with a father, mother, three sons, and three daughters. They also represented the 8 directions and 8 elements: heaven, earth, fire, water, wind, thunder, lake, and mountain. When two of these trigrams are placed one on top of another, it produces a hexagram of six lines. There are 64 possible combinations of these hexagrams. Each individual hexagram has a given interpretation used to guide the querent, or person asking the question. One of the best books I have ever read explaining the I-Ching in depth is The Tao of I-Ching by Tsung Hwa Jou published by the Tai Chi Foundation in 1984.
In chess, two opponents play with 16 pieces each in a strategy-based battle of wits in an attempt to capture each other’s king. Each player has one king, one queen, two bishops, two knights, two rooks, and eight pawns. Each of these pieces has a different set of rules describing how they are allowed to move. The pieces are usually different colors such as black and white so that each player can distinguish theirs from their opponents. The game is played in turn until one player is unable to move his king without being captured, which is called a checkmate.
It is interesting to note that both chess and I-Ching are very binary, and those of you who may be computer programmers will enjoy this. Each player has 8 pawns, who are the soldiers on the front line, making a total of 16 pawns, all starting on rows 2 and 7 respectively. Then on each player’s back row, 1 and 8 respectively, are the ‘court’ pieces each in pairs in opposite positions. For example, each rook is on the corner, labeled as A1 and H1 for white, and A8 and H8 for black. Each knight is next to the rook on grid spaces B1 and G1 for white, and B8 and G8 for black. Then each bishop is next to the knight on spaces C1 and F1 for white, and C8 and F8 for black. Finally, the monarchs with each queen on the square that is the same color as her team so that they are also opposite their counterparts. Each player has 8 ‘court’ pieces making a total of 16. This means that at the start of the game, 32 spaces on the board are occupied by the players pieces and 32 spaces are empty or left open in between for movement and action to take place. If one were to place each of the 64 hexagrams on each of the spaces on a chess board, and interesting pattern is revealed. There is only one hexagram that has no yang, six with 5 yin lines and 1 yang, fifteen with 4 yin and 2 yang, twenty with an even balance of 3 yin and 3 yang, fifteen with 4 yang and 2 yin, six with 5 yang and 1 yin, and only one with no yin. These can be arranged so that the one with no yin and the fifteen with 2 yin can be placed on the first two rows as white’s pieces. The one with no yang and the fifteen with 2 yang can be placed on the last two rows as black’s pieces. The six hexagrams with only one yang line and the six with only one yin line occupy the twelve squares surrounding the central four spaces. This leaves the twenty hexagrams with an even balance of yin and yang to occupy the central four squares and the four sets of four spaces on either side of the spaces where the previous twelve were placed. (See the diagram below). In this we have 7 separate ratio groupings which can be correlated to the 7 planets. There are 5 groups of four which can be correlated to the 5 elements and their sub elements. There are 12 hexagrams of balanced yin and yang which can be correlated to the 12 signs of the zodiac.
The pieces with either all yang or all yin can represent the kings since there is only one of each and they are the most important piece. The other fifteen hexagrams with a ratio of 4 of one and 2 of the other representing the pawns and court pieces, when including the king, can also be related to the 16 Jungian archetypes. Thus, when both sides are included, they can be related to the 32 paths of wisdom on the Tree of Life. In addition, when the reverse paths, known as the Qlippoth, are included with the empty spaces, we have the entire 64 hexagram set. This in turn could also be correlated to the 64 tetrahedron crystal lattice fractal grid.
All of this is laid out on an 8 x 8 grid which is similar to the Kamea, or planetary square, of Mercury. One could potentially place each hexagram of the I-Ching in the same sequence as the numbers within the magic number square. Or if one were inclined, they could follow the knight’s tour as discovered by the mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707 – 1783). This is a special path taken by a single knight on the chess board where it touches every square without landing on the same one twice.
If this is of interest to you, please feel free to contact me and ask for a diagram that I made that for some reason unknown to me, would not copy into this blog.
