How to Adjust When Things Go Wrong? Look at the Ancient Wisdom Hidden in the Hetu and Luoshu

Legend has it that in ancient times, there was a young man in the Luoyang area who squatted by the Yellow River sighing every day. Why? His crops had been flooded, the woven bamboo baskets wouldn’t sell, and even the old hen he raised had gone on strike and stopped laying eggs — it was like he couldn’t catch a break no matter what he did. Everyone who saw him shook their heads: “This kid is probably doomed to bad luck all the way through.”

One day, as he was squatting by the river picking at mud, he suddenly heard the waves on the river crashing loudly. He looked up and nearly dropped the clod of mud in his hand — a dragon horse covered in patterns was treading the waves toward him, with a strange, odd-looking pattern on its back. The horse didn’t harm anyone; it ambled over to him, nudged the pattern on its back toward his eyes, then turned and dove back into the river, vanishing from sight.

The young man held the pattern and studied it for half the night, finding it more fascinating the longer he looked. The black and white dots on the pattern were arranged in formations, scattered here and there in clusters. They looked chaotic, but in reality they secretly followed the rules of the four directions and eight positions. He suddenly slapped his thigh: “So all my farming before was just blind work! I never had a clear idea of which plots were high and which were low, which faced the sun and which were in shade — no wonder it all came down to luck?”

Not long after, an old turtle surfaced from the Luo River, with another even more mysterious pattern carved on its shell. This made the young man even more enthusiastic. He laid the two patterns side by side to compare, and figured out many tricks: for example, spring sowing should follow the direction of the east wind, autumn harvest should avoid the flood season of the Luo River, and even moving the chicken coop at home made the hens lay eggs more frequently.

Later, people learned that this young man was Fuxi. The pattern he got from the back of the dragon horse in the Yellow River was called the *Hetu* (Yellow River Map), and the one he took from the back of the divine turtle in the Luo River was called the *Luoshu* (Luo River Scroll). What is said in *I Ching · Great Treatise I* — “The Yellow River brings forth the Map, the Luo River brings forth the Scroll, and the sages take them as models” — refers to exactly this story.

You know, this story still makes a lot of sense today. Many people panic as soon as they hit a snag, either blaming everyone and everything else, or rushing to find random solutions in desperation. In fact, the most important thing to do is to calm down first and sort out your thoughts. How do you adjust when you feel like you’re out of luck? Don’t rush around praying to gods and buddhas; first learn from Fuxi’s spirit of diligent study. Break down the matters in front of you, figure out which parts are causes and which are effects, which steps went astray and which were on the right track. Once you understand the patterns, you’ll naturally find ways to deal with them.

And what about seeing the situation clearly? The white and black dots on the *Hetu* are laid out plainly: which are the “generating numbers” and which are the “completing numbers”, which positions add up to fifteen — it looks like a number game, but in reality it teaches you to find order in chaos. Just like how Fuxi deduced the Eight Trigrams from the two patterns back then, the essence is to break down the principles of heaven and earth into small modules. When you encounter something, you apply these modules to it, and the general direction won’t be wrong.

So, don’t cry about bad luck as soon as something goes wrong. The ancients said “Man proposes, heaven disposes” — it doesn’t mean you should tough it out blindly, but that you should learn to find the end of the thread in a tangled mess. Just like those dense dots on the *Hetu* and *Luoshu*, they look dizzying at first glance, but if you really calm down and count them, the sums of the rows, columns and diagonals are all fixed numbers. The twists and turns in life are pretty much the same when you get down to it. Once you get the rhythm right, even the hardest obstacles can be navigated around.