Hexagram 38睽Opposition
Two parties under the same roof whose aims now point in different directions. The hexagram is explicit that the situation does not yield to grand reconciliation; it yields to small matters. The practical question is whether the actor can refuse both the temptation to force the larger agreement and the temptation to read the other party as monstrous, and instead occupy the modest centre where mutual recognition becomes possible again.
60-second read
Opposition is the hexagram for the moment two parties whose lives are still joined have started to move in different directions. The hexagram statement is four characters — 睽，小事吉 — Opposition, small matters fortunate. The slightness is the instruction. The work is not the grand reconciliation the actor is tempted to attempt, nor the rupture the actor is tempted to perform; it is the small, repeated acts of mutual recognition the line texts dramatize. The hexagram's sharpest warning sits at line 6: the failure mode is reading the other party as a pig covered in mud or a wagon carrying ghosts, when they are merely different.
The hexagram
睽：小事吉。
Opposition: small matters fortunate. — Translation by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese
“Khwei indicates that, (notwithstanding the condition of things which it denotes), in small matters there will (still) be good fortune.”
— James Legge, The Sacred Books of the East: The I Ching (1882), public domain.
The six lines
Click any line on the hexagram to read its passage. Use ↑ and ↓ after focusing the hexagram to step through the six positions.
悔亡。喪馬勿逐自復，見惡人無咎。
Occasion for repentance disappears. The horse is lost; do not pursue it — it returns of itself. Meeting bad people — no error.
“The first NINE, undivided, shows that (to its subject) occasion for repentance will disappear. He has lost his horses, but let him not seek for them; — they will return of themselves. Should he meet with bad men, he will not err (in communicating with them).”
— Legge (1882)
Line 1 is the yang at the bottom — the opening position inside the divergence, where the actor is still close enough to the rupture moment that the temptation is to chase what has just moved away. The instruction is twofold and counter-intuitive. 喪馬勿逐自復 — the horse is lost; do not pursue it; it returns of itself. The pursuit would make the loss permanent; the restraint is what permits the return. 見惡人無咎 — meeting bad people produces no error. The line names the second discipline of the opening position: refusing the moral verdict that would close the door on parties the actor has classified as adversarial.
In a decision context this is the line for the partnership whose alignment has just slipped, the team member whose loyalty has just shifted, the customer whose enthusiasm has just cooled. The temptation is to chase — to send the urgent email, schedule the corrective conversation, name the breach explicitly while it is still fresh. The line is explicit that the chase produces the very permanence the actor is trying to avoid. The second clause is harder: the line is not saying the actor will end up with bad people; it is saying that in the opposition phase the actor will be required to remain in contact with parties whose conduct or position is unacceptable, and that the contact itself does not constitute moral compromise. Founders, executives, and partners who learn to hold both disciplines at line 1 — refuse the chase, refuse the moral verdict — keep the door open for the line-5 reconciliation the hexagram allows.
遇主于巷，無咎。
Meeting the lord in a back lane. No error.
“The second NINE, undivided, shows its subject happening to meet with his lord in a bye-lane. There will be no error.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 2 is the centred yang of the lower trigram — the hexagram’s most compact lesson about the geometry of reconciliation. The lord is met not in the audience hall, not through the official channel, not at the formal meeting where positions would have to be defended. The lord is met 于巷 — in a back lane. The informality is the protective frame. In opposition, the formal encounter forces each party into the posture the divergence has already hardened; the informal encounter permits the recognition the formal one would have prevented.
Read into the decision context, line 2 is the line of the side conversation that prevents the board fight, the coffee that resets the co-founder relationship, the unannounced visit to the customer whose churn was already on the dashboard. The hexagram is explicit that the move is not the staged confrontation but the unstaged encounter — and equally explicit that no error attaches to operating outside the formal channel during opposition. Executives who insist on resolving divergence only through official meetings typically discover that the meetings ratify the divergence rather than reverse it. The line is permission to use the bye-lane. It is also a sharper claim than it appears: the lord whom the actor needs to meet is precisely the figure whose formal interactions with the actor have become brittle, and the recovery runs through the geometry that allows both parties to drop the formal posture for the duration of the encounter.
見輿曳，其牛掣，其人天且劓，無初有終。
Seeing the carriage dragged back, its oxen forced aside, its driver with shaved head and severed nose. No good beginning; a good end.
“The third SIX, divided, shows its subject (in a situation when) he sees the carriage dragged back, and the oxen in it pushed back, and (himself) subjected to the shaving of his head and the cutting off of his nose. There is no good beginning, but there will be a good end.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 3 is the top of the lower trigram and the hexagram’s hardest middle line. The image is a complete picture of obstruction: the carriage cannot move forward because it is being dragged back from behind; the oxen pulling the carriage cannot align because they are being pushed sideways; the driver has been ritually disfigured — 天且劓, the shaving of the head and the cutting of the nose, the Zhou-era punishments that marked the subject as criminal. Every vector is blocked simultaneously. The line then makes the hexagram’s most specific structural claim: 無初有終 — no good beginning, but a good end.
The decision-relevant translation is the line that names the worst phase of the opposition arc and refuses to treat it as terminal. The actor is in the position where every move is blocked, every alliance has been read as betrayal, the official record now carries marks that cannot be removed in the short term. The temptation is to read the present-tense disfigurement as final state. The line is explicit that it is not. The beginning is bad; the end is good; the work is the survival of the period between them without acts that would convert the temporary marks into permanent ones. For founders and operators in the middle of public disputes, line 3 is the line for the moment the reputational damage has already happened and the only remaining work is to refuse the acts that would compound it. The hexagram does not promise the disfigurement is undeserved or recoverable in detail; it promises only that the arc does not end at line 3.
睽孤，遇元夫，交孚，厲無咎。
Solitary in opposition. Meeting the original man; blending sincere desires together. Peril, but no error.
“The fourth NINE, undivided, shows its subject solitary amidst the (prevailing) disunion. (But) he meets with the good man (represented by the first line), and they blend their sincere desires together. The position is one of peril, but there will be no error.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 4 is the shi line of the hexagram — the actor’s own position — and it opens with the hexagram’s starkest two characters: 睽孤, solitary in opposition. The actor is alone inside the divergence; the support structures the institution would normally provide have dissolved. The line then names the move that resolves it. 遇元夫 — meeting the original man, the figure of line 1 with whom the actor shares fundamental correspondence. 交孚 — blending sincere desires together. 厲無咎 — the position is perilous, but there is no error.
Read into the decision context, line 4 is the line of the executive who has been isolated inside an opposition phase and who recovers by reconnecting with the original ally — the first co-founder, the original mentor, the partner from the founding moment whose alignment with the actor is structural rather than situational. The hexagram is precise that this is not the formal alliance-building of the political position; it is the renewal of an existing sincere correspondence. The peril is named honestly. Returning to the original ally inside an opposition phase is exposed work; the renewed alliance can be misread by the parties on the other side of the divergence as a faction-forming move. The line is explicit that no error attaches to it regardless. The 元夫 is the structural partner the actor was correctly aligned with before the opposition opened, and the sincere blending of desires with that partner is the line’s prescription against the solitude line 4 begins with.
悔亡。厥宗噬膚，往何咎。
Occasion for repentance disappears. With his clansman he closes as readily as biting through soft skin. Going forward — what error?
“The fifth SIX, divided, shows that (to its subject) occasion for repentance will disappear. With his relative (and minister) he unites closely and readily as if he were biting through a piece of skin. When he goes forward (with this help), what error can there be?”
— Legge (1882)
Line 5 is the ruler line and the hexagram’s most generous promise. 悔亡 — occasion for repentance disappears. The reconciliation the hexagram permits is named not as the great public reunion of opposed parties but as a close, almost effortless alignment with the actor’s 宗 — the clansman, the structural kin. 噬膚 — biting through soft skin — is a deliberate image of low resistance: the kind of chewing that requires almost no force. The line is naming the reconciliation that becomes available the moment the actor stops trying to force the larger one.
The decision-relevant translation is twofold. The first move is recognition that the line-5 reconciliation does not look like resolving the dispute the actor has been prosecuting; it looks like rediscovering an alliance with the figure whose correspondence to the actor was always structural. The 宗 is not necessarily the original line-1 ally of line 4; it is the kinship-equivalent position in the institutional structure — the board director whose interests track the actor's, the strategic partner whose product roadmap matches the actor's, the senior peer whose career arc shares the actor's. The second move is the willingness to go forward with the alignment once it is established. 往何咎 — going forward, what error? — is the line's explicit invitation to act on the renewed alliance rather than waiting for the rest of the opposition to resolve. The hexagram closes its arc here for actors who reach line 5 by the disciplined sequence: lose the horse without chasing it (line 1); meet the lord in the bye-lane (line 2); survive the disfigurement without compounding it (line 3); renew the original alliance under peril (line 4); align with the clansman and move (line 5).
睽孤，見豕負塗，載鬼一車，先張之弧，後說之弧。匪寇婚媾，往遇雨則吉。
Solitary in opposition. Seeing a pig covered in mud, a wagon carrying ghosts. First drawing the bow; afterwards unbending it. Not a robber — a kinsman seeking marriage. Going forward, meeting the rain — fortune.
“The topmost NINE, undivided, shows its subject solitary amidst the (prevailing) disunion. (In the subject of the third line, he seems to) see a pig bearing on its back a load of mud, (or fancies) there is a carriage full of ghosts. He first bends his bow against him, and afterwards unbends it, (for he discovers) that he is not an assailant to injure, but a near relative. Going forward, he shall meet with (genial) rain, and there will be good fortune.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 6 is the topmost line and the hexagram’s most cinematic moment. The actor is solitary again — 睽孤, the same two characters that opened line 4 — and the perceptual field has now distorted into hallucination. The figure approaching is read first as a pig covered in mud, then as a wagon carrying ghosts. The actor draws the bow. The hexagram then turns: 匪寇婚媾 — not a robber, a kinsman seeking marriage. The bow is unbent. The rain falls. Fortune.
The decision-relevant translation is the I Ching’s sharpest warning about the perceptual failure that closes off line-5 reconciliation. The pig-in-mud and ghost-wagon are not descriptions of the other party; they are descriptions of how the actor sees the other party after enough time inside the opposition. The misperception is the failure mode, not the situation. Line 6 is precise that the corrective is internal: the actor un-draws the bow, recognises the approaching figure as a relative rather than an adversary, and the rain that ends the drought of the opposition phase is permitted to fall. For founders and operators who have been inside a long divergence — a co-founder rift, a long-running customer dispute, a contested partnership unwind — line 6 is the line that asks whether the monstrous depiction of the other party in the actor’s own head is description or projection. The hexagram’s closing fortune is reserved for actors who can do the unbinding of the bow.
PostureSame yet different · small acts of recognition
Opposition puts lake (Dui) below and fire (Li) above. The Tuan compresses the image with surgical precision: 火動而上，澤動而下 — fire moves and ascends; lake moves and descends. Two energies under the same hexagram whose natural directions point in opposite ways. The second image in the Tuan extends the picture into human terms: 二女同居，其志不同行 — two daughters dwell together, but their aims do not move together. The hexagram’s situation is not estrangement between strangers; it is the divergence of parties whose lives are still structurally joined and whose aims have nevertheless separated.
The hexagram statement is four characters and one of the briefest in the entire Yijing: 睽，小事吉 — Opposition, small matters fortunate. The slightness of the permitted action is the decision content. The hexagram is explicit that opposition does not yield to grand reconciliation — the kind of large gesture, public reunion, or all-encompassing settlement the actor is tempted to attempt — and equally explicit that it does not require rupture. The work is small: the back-lane meeting of line 2, the original-ally renewal of line 4, the clansman alignment of line 5. The fortune in opposition is unlocked only by actors willing to operate at small scope until the larger conditions turn.
The Xiang then closes the structural reading with a four-character ethical instruction: 君子以同而異 — the noble person accordingly is the same yet different. The phrase is the hexagram’s most precise prescription. The opposition is not denied; the difference is not erased; and the underlying sameness is not abandoned. The actor holds both at once. The Tuan’s closing line generalises the principle to cosmic scope: 天地睽而其事同也，男女睽而其志通也，萬物睽而其事類也 — heaven and earth are opposed yet their work is the same; male and female are opposed yet their aims communicate; the ten thousand things are opposed yet their work is of one kind. The opposition is structural; so is the underlying correspondence. Both are real.
Failure modesCarriage dragged back (line 3) · pig in mud (line 6 misperception)
The dominant failure mode is the line-6 perceptual collapse. The actor has been inside the opposition long enough that the other party has stopped registering as differently-aimed kin and started registering as monstrous: a pig covered in mud, a wagon carrying ghosts. The bow is drawn. The hexagram is precise that the misperception is the failure, not the situation, and that the corrective is internal — the un-drawing of the bow, the recognition that the approaching figure is a kinsman seeking marriage rather than an assailant. Founders, partners, and executives who let the line-6 projection harden into description typically discover that the projection becomes self-fulfilling: the other party, treated as a ghost, eventually behaves like one.
The secondary failure mode is the line-3 overreach — acting through the worst phase of the opposition as if the disfigurement were already permanent. The carriage is being dragged back, the oxen are being pushed sideways, the ritual marks have already been applied. The temptation is to read the present-tense blockage as terminal state and act accordingly: sever the partnership, exit the team, file the irreversible legal step. The hexagram is explicit that 無初有終 — the beginning is bad, the end is good — and that the work at line 3 is the survival of the period without acts that would convert the temporary marks into permanent ones. Both failures share a root: an actor who has stopped reading the hexagram’s small-matters discipline and started prosecuting the opposition at a scale the hexagram does not permit.
Application & adjacentQuestion shape · Hexagram 37 pair · The small-matters discipline
A note on the question shape this hexagram answers best. Opposition rewards questions framed around an active divergence inside a relationship, partnership, team, or institution that is still structurally joined: the co-founder relationship whose roadmaps have started to point in different directions, the long-running partnership whose interests have separated, the team whose leadership and senior managers have stopped agreeing on direction, the household whose members have begun to want different futures. It is less useful for questions about clean strangers or about institutions the actor has already exited. Opposition presumes the parties are still under the same roof. The hexagram is the instruction layer for what to do while the divergence is active and the structural joint remains.
The canonical adjacent reading is Hexagram 37 — The Family — the structural pair in the King Wen sequence. Where Family names the discipline of the small-group institution whose internal roles are precisely held and whose influence therefore projects outward as wind from fire, Opposition names what happens when the same household’s internal directions have separated — the fire still rising, the lake now sinking, the daughters still dwelling together but with aims that no longer point toward the same centre. The two together form the complete instruction for the small-group institution across both its ordered and its strained phases. Operators who keep both hexagrams in view tend to invest more seriously in the Hexagram 37 line-1 regulation work, because Hexagram 38 names the cost of the regulations that were skipped.
The line-5 instruction is the hexagram’s operational centre. 厥宗噬膚，往何咎 — with his clansman he closes as readily as biting through soft skin; going forward, what error? — is the picture of the reconciliation the hexagram actually permits. The decision-relevant move is twofold. The first is recognition that the line-5 reconciliation is not the staged settlement of the larger dispute; it is the rediscovered alignment with the figure whose correspondence to the actor was structural before the opposition opened. The second is the willingness to act on the renewed alignment rather than waiting for the rest of the field to resolve. The hexagram’s fortune concentrates at line 5 for actors who reach it by the disciplined small-matters sequence and is forfeited by actors who attempt the grand reconciliation the hexagram does not authorise.
SynthesisYiGram Editorial
Each Western line of reading approaches Opposition from a different angle. James Legge transliterates 睽 as “Khwei” and frames the hexagram within his Confucian moral lens — the disunion that the noble person navigates through centred correctness, with line 5 read as the ruler whose yielding centre corresponds to the firm and resolves the opposition. Richard Wilhelm’s symbolic-philosophical posture reads the hexagram as “Opposition” in the more existential sense — the structural condition of difference whose timely use is, as the Tuan claims, vast. A reading in the lineage of Carl Jung’s 1949 foreword would treat 38 as a marker of projection and shadow: the line-6 pig-in-mud and ghost-wagon images are the canonical picture of the unintegrated shadow appearing as monstrous, and the un-drawing of the bow is the Jungian moment of withdrawing the projection. Bradford Hatcher’s linguistic project (below) abandons all three framings and returns to the semantic field of 睽 itself — divergence, dissonance, polarization, the act of staring as if in disbelief. None of these readings is quoted on this page; the synthesis is YiGram Editorial’s characterization of each tradition’s posture, written so a reader can triangulate the field without us reproducing copyrighted text.
Reception historyLegge · Wilhelm · Baynes · Jung
The Western reception of the I Ching has two main lines. The first is James Legge’s 1882 missionary translation in the Sacred Books of the East series — methodical, Victorian, framed around Confucian moral readings. It is the public-domain anchor reproduced above. The second is Richard Wilhelm’s 1923 German translation, prepared in Qingdao in collaboration with Lao Naixuan — sympathetic, philosophical, closer to Daoist intuitions. Cary F. Baynes rendered Wilhelm into English in 1950, with a foreword by Carl Jung that introduced the book to Western psychology as a window onto synchronicity and the unconscious.
We cite these two lines by name to credit the reception history and to help search systems and readers resolve the entities; the Wilhelm/Baynes text itself and Jung’s foreword remain in copyright and are not quoted on this page. A more recent academic-linguistic line is represented by Bradford Hatcher’s Yijing project (1990s–2010s), which appears in the next section under his explicit redistribution permission.
Bradford HatcherVerbatim · © 2011
Hatcher organizes each hexagram around six short clusters of keywords that sketch the field of decision and association the Chinese name opens onto. For Hexagram 38 睽, his clusters are:
Divergence, dissociation, disparity, dissonance, dissention, discord, contradiction Polarization, parting of ways, ambivalence, tension, stress; odd, crafty, perverse Uniqueness, diversity, contrast, standing out, sticking out, separation, strangeness To stare, squint as if disbelieving, be astonished; individual nature, distinctiveness Separateness, aloneness, alienation, incongruity; to stand alone, agree to disagree Detachment, isolation, aloneness; emphasis, articulation, stress as in highlighting
Hatcher’s framing is vocabulary-centred rather than narrative — the reader is invited to feel the semantic shape of the Chinese name through the spread of English fragments. For his longer notes and the full glossary entry, read the complete passage on hermetica.info.
Quoted verbatim from Bradford Hatcher, Yijing Hexagram Names and Core Meanings (Version 12.1, 2011), hermetica.info/GuaMing.htm. © Bradford Hatcher, 2011. Reproduced under the author’s explicit permission to redistribute his work intact, with copyright notice. Bradford Hatcher (d. June 2020); site maintained to preserve his work.
SynthesisYiGram Editorial
Read across the four Chinese traditions, Hexagram 38 names a precise working posture: a divergence inside a relationship or institution that is still structurally joined, and the corresponding discipline of small acts of mutual recognition rather than grand reconciliation or moral rupture. The Wings give the canonical reading: fire rises and lake sinks; two daughters dwell together with aims that do not move together; the noble person is the same yet different; heaven and earth are opposed yet their work is the same. Wang Bi sharpens the structural reading: 睽 is not a hexagram about enmity but about misalignment, and the line texts describe the specific scopes — back-lane meeting at line 2, original-ally renewal at line 4, clansman alignment at line 5 — at which the misalignment becomes workable. Zhu Xi reframes the hexagram around the perceptual-discipline reading: the line-6 pig-in-mud / wagon-of-ghosts image is the canonical picture of how the actor’s perception of the other party distorts inside long opposition, and the un-drawing of the bow is the corrective the hexagram requires. The divinatory manual Bushi Zhengzong reads 38 strictly as the marker for active relational or institutional divergence — partnerships, marriages, co-founder relationships, long-running team conflicts — rather than as commentary on whether the actor is in the right. The unified posture across all four sources is the same: Opposition is a discipline for refusing both the false reconciliation and the false rupture, holding the same-yet-different posture, and operating at the small scope the hexagram permits until the line-5 reconciliation becomes available.
Yi ZhuanTuan + Xiang · Ten Wings
The Ten Wings are the canonical Confucian commentary stratum embedded in the received Yijing. For Hexagram 38 the two most directly relevant Wings are the Tuan Zhuan (彖傳, the Judgement Commentary) and the Xiang Zhuan (象傳, the Image Commentary). The Tuan for Opposition is one of the most rhetorically ambitious in the Yijing, ending in a cosmic generalisation of the opposition-yet-correspondence principle.
Tuan 彖傳: 睽，火動而上，澤動而下，二女同居，其志不同行。說而麗乎明，柔進而上行，得中而應乎剛，是以小事吉。天地睽而其事同也，男女睽而其志通也，萬物睽而其事類也。睽之時用大矣哉。
Opposition: fire moves and ascends; lake moves and descends; two daughters dwell together, but their aims do not move together. Delight adhering to brightness; the yielding advances and proceeds upward, gains the centre and corresponds to the firm — therefore “small matters fortunate”. Heaven and earth are opposed yet their work is the same; male and female are opposed yet their aims communicate; the ten thousand things are opposed yet their work is of one kind. Vast indeed is the timely use of Opposition.
Xiang 象傳: 上火下澤，睽。君子以同而異。
Fire above, lake below — Opposition. The noble person accordingly is the same yet different.
The Tuan does the structural work: the fire-rising / lake-sinking configuration is what makes the opposition structural rather than accidental, and the two-daughters image grounds the abstract claim in the situation the hexagram actually answers. The line-5 yielding that gains the centre and corresponds to the firm is what makes the small-matters fortune possible. The closing generalisation — 睽之時用大矣哉, vast indeed is the timely use of Opposition — is the Tuan’s claim that opposition is not pathology but structural condition, and that the hexagram’s discipline is one of the Yijing’s great timing instructions. The Xiang compresses the whole hexagram into four characters: 同而異 — the same yet different — the precise posture the noble person holds inside the opposition. Translations by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese.
Classical commentariesWang Bi · Zhu Xi · Bushi Zhengzong
Wang Bi (Zhouyi Zhu, 3rd century) reads Hexagram 38 as a structural argument about misalignment rather than enmity. For Wang Bi the hexagram’s decision logic is the precise scoping of what each line position can and cannot attempt. Line 1 refuses the chase; line 2 takes the back-lane meeting; line 3 survives the worst phase without compounding it; line 4 renews the original-ally correspondence under peril; line 5 closes with the clansman in the move that requires almost no force; line 6 unbinds the bow once the projection has been recognised as projection. The hexagram’s structure, in Wang Bi’s reading, is the recognition that opposition is worked through small-scope acts in sequence rather than resolved through any single grand gesture.
Zhu Xi (Zhouyi Benyi, 1188) reframes the hexagram around the perceptual-discipline reading the line-6 image requires. For Zhu Xi the pig-in-mud / wagon-of-ghosts hallucination is the canonical picture of how the actor’s perception of the other party distorts under long opposition, and the un-drawing of the bow is the corrective move the hexagram requires. The corollary is that the line-5 fortune depends on the perceptual work; an actor who arrives at line 5 still carrying the line-6 projection cannot perform the noiseless alignment the line names. Reconciliation is downstream of the perceptual correction, not parallel to it.
The Bushi Zhengzong (Qing-dynasty divinatory manual, 1709) reads 38 practically: a hexagram drawn in answer to a question about an active divergence inside a relationship or institution — partnership, co-founder relationship, marriage, team whose leadership has stopped aligning, household at a moment of strain. The manual is explicit that 38 is not a commentary on whether the actor is morally in the right; the cast applies whether the actor is the party who has moved or the party who feels left behind. The practical recommendation tracks the line position the question lands at: do not chase at line 1; meet in the bye-lane at line 2; survive the worst phase at line 3; renew the original alliance at line 4; align with the clansman at line 5; un-draw the bow at line 6.
Translations and paraphrase by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese. We do not reuse any modern third-party English rendering of these commentaries.
These method notes are not required to read the hexagram. They organize the traditional six-line structure for readers who want to see the rule layer beneath the plain-language reading.
Palace: Gen (mountain / earth), fourth-generation (四世). Binary, bottom-up: 110101. Lower trigram: Dui (lake). Upper trigram: Li (fire). Shi line: 4. Ying line: 1.
The line branches, bottom-up, follow the Dui-below / Li-above najia composition for Opposition: 巳 (line 1), 卯 (line 2), 丑 (line 3), 酉 (line 4), 未 (line 5), 巳 (line 6). Read against the Gen palace, whose element is earth, the six-relatives assignments are: line 1 巳 (fire) — parents (父母); line 2 卯 (wood) — officials (官鬼); line 3 丑 (earth) — siblings (兄弟); line 4 酉 (metal) — offspring (子孫); line 5 未 (earth) — siblings (兄弟); line 6 巳 (fire) — parents (父母).
The shi line at position 4 carries offspring (酉, metal), which the palace’s own earth generates — the actor stands at the position the palace itself produces, which is the najia correlate of the line-4 遇元夫 instruction: the actor’s renewal of the original alliance under peril rests on the palace’s own generative ground. The ying line at position 1 carries parents (巳, fire), the element that in turn generates the palace’s earth. Read as a structural pair, the shi-ying axis of Opposition says that the actor occupies the palace’s own offspring position while the receiving position is the generative parent two generations behind it. The structural correlate of the Xiang’s 同而異: the same generative lineage holds both positions, even when their immediate aims diverge.
For a cast, this static layer records the palace, generation label, shi and ying positions, each line's branch and six-relative, moving-line positions, transformed hexagram, and the use-spirit selected by question category. The public page keeps that structure as a method note rather than as default reading text.
Audit status: unaudited_draft. The static-layer tables are pulled from the standard 京房纳甲 sequence and have not yet been cross-checked against the three reference texts named in the methodology. Errors should be reported against the v0.1.0 rule version in the GitHub rules directory.
For the full pipeline (how the static layer reaches the AI interpretation), see Methodology → Najia engine.
Sources
- Classical text of the Yijing (周易) — hexagram and line statements (卦辭 / 爻辭) from the received Zhou-dynasty edition. Public domain.
- James Legge, The Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XVI: The Yi King, Oxford University Press, 1882. Public domain.
- Zhu Xi (朱熹), Zhouyi Benyi (周易本義), 1188. Public domain.
- Wang Bi (王弼), Zhouyi Zhu (周易注), 3rd century. Public domain.
- Bushi Zhengzong (卜筮正宗), Qing-dynasty divinatory manual, 1709. Public domain.
- Tuan Zhuan (彖傳) and Xiang Zhuan (象傳), two of the Ten Wings (十翼). Public domain.
- Bradford Hatcher, Yijing Hexagram Names and Core Meanings (Version 12.1, 2011). © Bradford Hatcher, 2011. Reproduced under the author’s explicit permission to redistribute his work intact, with copyright notice; this page quotes the “Key Words” subsection only and links readers to the full original for the longer notes. Bradford Hatcher (d. June 2020).
All Chinese-to-English translations on this page are by YiGram Editorial, working directly from the classical Chinese. We do not reuse third-party modern English translations of any of the listed Chinese sources. Read the full source policy in the methodology page.
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