Fushigi Yuugi: Title Story

[branchandroot]

So, why did I choose this title? Well, it’s kind of a long story.

I started out looking at the hexagrams made up by the East and South related trigrams; I had two pair of options there, either Fire and Heaven or Thunder and Fire depending on whether you’re looking at the Greater or Lesser order, respectively. In point of fact, when I cast for the profile of the story itself what I got was a totally stable Thunder over Fire (Abundance). But it didn’t quite seem to fit with these pages, so I went and looked at the Fire and Water hexagrams instead. After Completion, Water over Fire, seemed to fit charmingly.

Before I try to explain why, let me explain a little about how one gets a hexagram in the first place so things will make a bit more sense. Not a whole lot, but a bit.

You take three coins. Heads count for three, tails for two. This means that every time you throw them you get one of four numbers by adding up your results: six, seven, eight or nine. Evens are a broken line, odds are a whole line. You throw the coins six times, recording the lines from the bottom up. There’s your hexagram.

This can be done with yarrow stalks also, but that method is a stone bitch so I’m not going to bother with it here. Go pick up the Wilhelm/Baynes edition of the I Ching if you’re curious. That, by the way, is the one all of my information came out of.

Anyway, the kicker of this system is that the intense high and low values in that set of four numbers, the six and the nine, mean a line that’s changing. Six changes to a solid line, nine to a broken one. Seven and eight are stable. There’s a different implication attached to each line in a hexagram changing, and it means that reading them can get really, really complicated. For the purposes of not turning my brain to goo, let’s assume that After Completion is all sevens and eights.

Now, then, the lower trigram is considered the internal one while the upper is considered the external. This means that the lower is frequently privileged when describing how the two interact, which is a major basis of interpretation. For instance, Earth over Heaven, The Army, indicates danger within and obedience without and is so a reasonably positive situation; Heaven over Earth, however, indicates craftiness since the outward display of strength is belied by hollowness or timorousness within. At the same time, within the whole hexagram, the lines can indicate ranked positions: the sixth (top) is the sage, the fifth is the monarch, the fourth is the minister, etc. Whether a particular position is occupied by a whole or broken line can indicate whether that particular person (in a given situation) is strong (whole) or yeilding (broken). So, for instance, Wind over Heaven in which line five is broken while all the others are whole, is read as The Taming Power of the Small–a yielding ruler who governs a strong people and ministry through gentleness and persuasion. A third point to take into consideration is that broken lines have a downward movement while whole lines have an upward movement. Whether or not these movements balance each other is often a consideration in saying whether a particular hexagram indicates a good or bad situation. Back to the first two examples, Earth over Heaven balances because the downward meets the upward, while Heaven over Earth indicates divergence and conflict. I’m not even going to get into how the nuclear trigrams are derived and what they mean; I’m still working on the basics of this system myself.

None of these interpretive systems is entirely consistent. Which interpretation is used varies from one hexagram to another. I have yet to discover any particular rhyme or reason to it, but that’s about what I expect from a book written by committee over several hundred years.

So then, on to After Completion.

One of the things I liked about this is that the inner-outer arrangement lines up with my perceptions of Yui as the outer and Miaka as the inner aspects of their diad. Extending this, it is the aggressive, Seiryuu, that belongs to outward expression and the loving, Suzaku, that belongs inward, in the same manner that Water, the aspect of movement and danger, occupies the outward face and Fire, illumination, radiates from within. More than that, though, the sense of it accords with my sense of where the story ends. After Completion is the moment of equilibrium, of goals accomplished, of everything being in it’s place. The whole and broken lines pair up in proper balance of directions (remember Earth over Heaven). In Wilhelm’s words, “it gives reason for thought. For it is just when perfect equilibrium has been reached that any movement may cause order to revert to disorder” (244). This, I think, is exactly where this story ends. The story has ended, but both the world of the imagination and the ‘real’ world go on. These characters aren’t left with a flip happily-ever-after; it’s clear they have things to remember and apply as life goes on. The ending, the equilibrium, only obtains for a moment.