Dong Zhongshu
The name Wen Wang Gua means "King Wen's fortune telling hexagrams" (or trigrams, since gua can mean either hexagram or trigram). King Wen of Zhou and his son are traditionally said to be the authors of the "I Ching". The elemental correspondences of the trigrams were not originally part of the tradition associated with King Wens name, but may have been based on a trigram sequence described in the "Eighth Wing" (one of the "Ten Wings", a series of appendixes to the "I Ching" which are usually ascribed to Confucius). That the use of element correlation theories was relevant at the time can be seen from the extant records, such as the Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals, a compilation of earlier texts which was attributed to Dong Zhongshu. As one modern researcher remarks: "Dong Zhongshu is generally remembered as the author of a detailed system of correspondences in which everything was correlated to one of the five fundamental forces, so that everything could be shown to be interrelated in an orderly and comprehensible manner." Jing Fang and his teacher, the author of the "Forest of Changes by Jiao", were among the first to apply this form of correlative thinking to I Ching divination.