The genius of the Yijing is that its interpenetrating strata of sequence, structure, and language bind every element—each character, metaphor, phrase, hexagram, and line—to every other element of the text. The internal structures and symmetries of the hexagram diagrams and their constituent trigrams generate further structures that define the role of each hexagram in the overall sequence. Understanding this, it becomes clear why hexagrams that are cousins in meaning are found far apart in the sequence. Such hexagrams perform related functions in different locations in the sequence. Thus, understanding the sequence map—and the hexagrams' functions within it—is essential to understanding the meaning of the hexagram texts.
This diagram illustrates the structures of the received sequence of the 64 Hexagrams
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