"FO-HI"

Zélia de Toledo Piza

The book "Illuminated I-Ching", of Judy Fox and other, puts Fo-Hi, belonging to the Chinese tradition, as having lived there is more of 5.000 years. He wrote one of the oldest existent books, I-Ching. He belonged to the historical period of the August Three - Fo-Hi, Chen-Nong and Houang-you, in other words, Three Houangs, representative of the three fundamental powers - the one of the Sky, the one of the Earth and the one of the Man.

At that time the Chinese people were a nomadic people, living of the pasturing and they began observing that there was a binary cycle in the nature: the alternations of light and shadow, day and night, the natural cycle of the stations regulating the agricultural works, the life in communities that obeyed activity periods and rest, according to the apparent position of the sun above or below the horizon. They noticed the existent contradictions in the whole Nature: the cold time opposing to the hot and sunny days, the sky and the earth, the earth and the sea, the male and the female, the man and the woman, the man and the animal, the animal and the vegetable, the vegetable and the mineral, the organic and the inorganic, the dynamic and the static, the life and the death... the birth containing the germ of the death and the death containing the germ of the life, the day generating the night and the night generating the day...

They also noticed the relationships between the physical exterior of our existence and the interior of our souls... Looking for the sense of those alternations and contradictions, there says a Chinese text: "It is observing the norms that the nature marks, that the man acquires the tranquility and the peace; infringing them, his sensitive organism will be unbalance taking not only to limit their functions and possibilities as to depreciate his nobleman mission. For the man to maintain a relationship with the Whole, with the Universal Order, is necessary that he has knowledge of his own operation and of the world that surrounds him".

The magazine Dharana of the Brazilian Society of Eubiose, number 12 of l.982, it counts the following with base in writer Louis Chochod, great specialist of I-Ching: "Certain time, Emperor Fo-Hi, walking to River Yellow's margins, he saw a dragon appear bringing in his back an octagonal picture, containing Eight Trigrams disposed in turn of a circle, half red and half black. To that symbolism he gave the name of Pa-Koua. Emperor Fo-Hi understood, in his high wisdom, to treat of a Message of the Sky, an answer to the two constants inquiries. In the dragon we should see a symbolism - the fastest, the most powerful, stronger, more potent, more durable, more efficient, more wise person, could exist so much in the Earth, as in the Water, in the Fire or in the Air. From the study of the Pa-Koua it result the book of I-Ching.

Fo-Hi didn't give a defined moral code, but it emphasized the existent polarity inside of the human soul and it showed that the only constructive form is the balance between the Badly and the Good, resulting in the Justice, only edifying form of action.

Fo-Hi classified those infinite activities, the alternations and the contradictions that the nature marks, in two categories. It took for base the day and the night, the light and the darkness, the heat and the cold, the dynamic and the static, the full and the emptiness as being the dominant factors in the nature and in the man.

Those activity oscillations, those two alternating and complemented times that we found in all of the things and phenomena, they were designated by the terms Yin and Yang. In the origin, Yin is everything that is inert and Yang is everything that is active. One of them is the rest and the other the movement.

With running of the times, the terms Yin and Yang were generalized and they were applied to the whole nature, to all of the sections of the human activities for they are considered the pivot of the transformations.

The Yang was related to the sun, day, clear, luminous, life, to wake up, work, happiness, hot, assets, masculine, positive, movement, with the Sky, the Father, the Energy, the Diffusion, the Time and, symbolically, expressed by the circle, by the odd number and by the sign             .

The Yin, with the moon, the night, darkness, death, rest, inactivity, inertia, sadness, cold, feminine, negative, receptive, with the Earth, the Mother, the Matter, the Condensation, Limitation, expressed for the Square, for the pair and for the sign             .

This dualism of Fo-Hi is not the same scholastic dualism of the Christian religions, that is fixed, unalterable, that which is badly is always badly, and the well always well, and they are for all the eternity. Here, the Good generates the Evil; and the Badly, when it reaches his fullness, it generates the Good...; the Life generates the Death and the Death generates the Life... There is no birth for anything mortal in the created Universe and the death doesn't put an end to any existence. There exists, yes, a diffusion and a condensation.