On the name of the hexagram Kun

By meticulously studying the related contents and the transformation history of the character 川 in the chapter Miu He copied on excavated silk, Shuo Gua Zhuan, Remarks on the Trigrams (in Zhouyi), and Shuo Wen Duan Zhu, Origin of Chinese Characters Annotated by DUAN Yu-cai, it can be seen that the character 川 in Zhouyi copied on excavated silk was not a miswritten character, the hexagram Kun's, 坤, pronounce was indeed derived from the pronounce of Shen, 申,but not from the combined connotations of earth, 土, and Shen, 申. No matter how different its writing styles were, it was definite that the 川 represents the hexagram Kun, 坤, and symbolizes earth. That the annotation as Kun,坤, connotes earth, 土, in the position of Shen, 申, was made by XU Shen (c. 58-c.147, who compiled the Origin of Chinese Characters, the earliest Chinese dictionary), and only coincides with the related interpretation of Kun in Jing Fang′s Divination by Yi. Therefore, XU′s annotation was evidently derived from the knowledge of the scholars of the Han Dynasty. It is inappropriate to demonstrate there had appeared the Qua-qi (concerning the correspondence between the trigrams and hexagrams to the seasonal points) theory in the Text of Zhouyi by changing the word order of the remarks attached to the hexagram Kun to adapt to the trigrams′ positional order different from the trigrams′ order in Zhouyi of current version and adding the 12 earthly branches which was only adopted in the Qua-qi theory in the Han Dynasty.