The ruler sacrificed to Taiyi in the center.
That is to say, on the altar, the <i>tan</i> 壇, which was prepared for the sacrifice to Taiyi,
"the place that was originally occupied by the Yellow Emperor," in the center, was now given to Taiyi.
And what happened to Huangdi then? Well, he got pushed off into the southwest.
Why the southwest? Because the southwest is the center of the year,
between the <i>yang</i> half of the year spring, summer and the <i>yin</i> half of the year autumn, winter.
At the end of summer beginning of fall,
well, that's the center of the year, so Huangdi gets pushed off to the southwest.
This <i>tan</i> in addition is an altar of pounded earth, <i>hangtu</i> 夯土,
of "three stories and eight entrances"; they're called <i>baguidao</i> 八鬼道:
the paths for all the spirits to come and converge on this <i>tan</i>.
And of course they're all placed in very specific places all around.
So in fact this <i>tan</i> represents a huge pantheon incorporating all the gods,
you could say that it represents sacrificial rationalization, sacrificial rationality.
"Along with the Great One," himself, "and the Five Emperors,
a multitude of gods were honored including the Sun, the Moon, the Big Dipper."
If you go to Beijing today, there's a <i>ritan</i> 日壇 and a <i>yuetan</i> 月壇 still left over, okay?
And this also recalls the worship of these star bodies, these astral bodies,
and of course the Big Dipper. Why the Big Dipper?
The Big Dipper is always the third of the three heavenly bodies which always goes together with the sun and the moon.
Why? Well, first of all, once again we see 1 plus 2 equals 3.
Because the sun of course is <i>yang</i>.
It's what lights up our day and so we live in the light of the sun; it's called <i>yangjian</i> 陽間.
But of course the light, the astral body of the night, is the moon, and so if this one is <i>yang</i>, that one is <i>yin</i>,
just as the day is <i>yang</i> and the night is <i>yin</i>.
But what then transcends that duality of the sun and the moon, of the <i>yang</i> and the <i>yin</i>,
it's always that third term, and the third term is the Big Dipper. <i>Beidou</i> 北斗, it's called in Chinese.
Why? Well, for that, you have to think about—most of us don't know that sort of information anymore,
because we can find it on Google,
and most of us don't spend our time traveling on the seas and having to find out where we are without GPS and using compasses and so on—
but where to find the north was of course always extremely important for orientation.
And so the Chinese, with a study of the sky, the <i>tiandao</i> 天道, the Heavenly Way,
that we've talked about before,
they discovered this regularity and of course they discovered that the Big Dipper, the <i>beidou</i>,
always is going around the <i>beiji</i> 北極, that is to say this Polar Star,
the Polar Star that Confucius in Chapter II says that the sovereign is like the Polar Star:
he's in the center of the heavens and all of the stars circle around him through the year.
So the one fixed spot in the center of the night heavens—not the day heavens, of the night heavens,
with those <i>tianwen</i> 天文, those heavenly patterns, those constellations— the center of course is the <i>beiji</i>, the Polar Star, the Pole Star.
But where we are in the year can be discovered by the position of the <i>beidou</i>,
the Big Dipper, with respect to the Pole Star.
And so the Big Dipper was placed on what I referred to in the last presentation,
it's placed on this <i>shi</i> 式, which is the ancestor of the <i>luopan</i> 羅盤, and so you had a movable top part of the <i>shi</i>,
which you could position to adapt the <i>yinyang wuxing bagua</i> and so on, you could adapt it to the particular moment, the time of year, okay?
So: the <i>beidou</i> is extremely important and to this day one of the texts that every Daoist knows how to recite is the <i>Beidoujing</i> 北斗經, okay?