The Chinese Calendar/Almanac

Some guy named Jerome Weng in Singapore responded to my Youtube video African Bagua #1 with the following comment:

Bagua is a sequence of pairs to form 64 possible comination. That is related to I -Ching. SO what is it that all these matters swayed to African dance or Chinese Music. Please read and find out more of Ganzhi system found in Bagua. Basically the Ganzhi system, composing of the Ten Celestial Stems and Twelve Terrestrial Branches. The truth is the China has a strong link to Middle East, not Africa.

Ganzhi is part of the Chinese Calendar-Almanac which is the oldest continuously published book on earth. I have followed it closely for about 10 years. A closer look at the Tongshu (another of the many names for the whole calendar) will strongly support my case. One way to understand it is as a composite/synchronization of all the calendars used by all the different ethnic and regional religous cults of China and it's neighbors. It is a collection of all religions perceptions of time, (really!). So baguazhang is in a sense like the Calendar, a collection of all the different physiologies of trance practiced in China.
Within the Tongshu there are two time cycles that follow the Yijing (I-Ching). One takes a different hexagram each six days and goes through each line in sequence with the moon. Because the moon “math� doesn’t quite add up, some of the hexagrams are only five lines/days instead of six- the top line gets dropped.
The second cycle is not actually a 64 day cycle, it is a 72 day cycle which is tied to the sun and thus reverses the counting sequence on the solstices. It is a 72 day cycle because every eighth day is a divination day, 64+8=72.
For years I used my baguazhang practice to embody the hexagram for that day. If you know eight palm changes which correspond to the eight trigrams, you can practice each hexagram too. Think of each hexagram as a transition between two trigrams and practice that transition. (So for example, hexagram 63 is li [fire] transitioning into kan [water].) On divination days, improvise!

And I wasn't going to point to a direct African or Middle-Eastern connection but Julie Lee Wei will! Correspondences Between the Chinese Calendar Signs and the Phoenecian Alphabet.