And most old masters, including O'Sensei Kim were very much into the Chinese Classics. The use of math and thus numbers within the Martial Arts such as Pau Kua and of course the Chin-variation of the Yang form are significant and meaningful for those of us who trained with O'Sensei.
We used this crest until after O'Sensei's death in 2001. Since we no longer held an affiliation with the old Japanese organization we decided we would drop the use of the 108 lines to differentiate our crest. Thus we adopted the 54 lines (Half of 108) which has a greater significance to the primary art, Shorinji-Ryu Karate, that was passed on to us by O'Sensei Richard Kim.