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Pythagoras was said to have been the first man to call himself a philosopher; in fact, the world is indebted to him for the word philosopher. Before that time the wise men had called themselves sages, which was interpreted to mean those who know. Pythagoras was more modest. He coined the word philosopher, which he defined as one who is attempting to find out.

  

For example, the Tetraktys is often described as just the equation 1+2+3+4 = 10. What is meant is that the 4 perspectives of the Monad, the Dyad, the Triad and the Tetrad or double dichotomy completely explain any subject.

Pythagoras discovered the Tetraktys which is the philosophical technique of analysis that describes the whole as a single Monad, then describes the same as polar opposites. The line of development of the Triad describes the process with beginning, middle and end. The 4-fold or Tetrad is the double dichotomy best known in modern terms with the Cartesian x-y axes.

Together these form a total philosophical analysis. The first 10 hexagrams of the I Ching in the King Wen Sequence is a simple and effective example.

The first set of 10, from 1-Creative/Sunshine to 10- the deep water lake (or sea) under the sunshine that would next evaporate water to complete the water cycle. Hex 1 is quite literally the water cycle--sunshine burns off mist to make clouds (Ch'ien). This is the monad, the whole water cycle described in a single term. The ideogram of Ch’ien is an image of the rays of the sun evaporating the miasmal mist of a swamp to form clouds to water the fields.... continue ... water symbolism of the I Ching