Rigel Kent

The icon and slogan found on the paperbag of Eu Yan Sang (余仁生) chinese drug store: (咸因)有心才会感恩 (approximately: Be grateful (to your parents), if you have heart) reminds me of an hexagram in the Chinese divinational classic. For the uninitiated, the slogan is a clever manipulation of Xian Yin (咸因) and Gan En (感恩). In the former, the hearts (心) are removed, and does not carry any meaning in modern Chinese. My guess is that the creator of the slogan did not know that the character Xian (咸) is actually a primitive form of the character Gan (感), a verb meaning sense or feel. Now back to the hexagram business, there are altogether 64 hexagrams documented in Yi Jing (易经, Wade-Giles romanization : I-Ching). One of them is very interesting from a human reproductive perspective because it contains the instructions on how to carry out foreplay before penile-vaginal penetration, it is Hexagram No. 31, known as Hexagram of Xian (咸卦). Given below is my translation of the interpretation ...

The biological aspect of human gametic cells is very interesting. At birth, a baby girl has only a fixed amount of eggs (maybe around one million) in her body. When she reached a certain age, we will see that her breasts will begin to grow bigger, and a little genie residing in her ovary will say to these one million eggs: "ok, I shall now start to send you to meet your boyfriends". Each month, the genie will pick a few thousands eggs and give them whatever training that is necessary. At the end of the training, the eggs will need to take what is known as the atresia examination. And the egg who score the highest mark will get the chance to embark on a romantic journey. The rest of the eggs are not sent back to the reservoir, but they are destroyed. From that point onwards, about 13 eggs are ovulated each year from the egg reservoir until the woman reached what is known as menopause. So, for her whole lifetime, a human female will only release about 400 eggs. The number of t...