Hexagram 47困Oppression
Water below, lake above — the lake whose water has sunk into the depths, the source cut off, the bed run dry. The character 困 pictures a tree confined inside an enclosure. The hexagram is the canonical instruction for the moment resources are exhausted and yet the work continues: the founder out of runway, the leader who has lost the room, the writer with nothing left to say. The practical question is not how to restore the missing resource on the spot, but how to keep the inner virtue intact while the outer situation rebuilds itself.
60-second read
Oppression is the hexagram for the moment resources are exhausted while the work continues. The hexagram statement is unusually layered: success is possible, firm correctness for the great person is fortunate, no fault is named — and yet there are words, but no one believes them. The diagnostic clause is the speech failure. In exhaustion, communication has lost its weight; the discipline is not to argue louder but to let the inner virtue survive the dry interval, to stake life on the aim without expecting the outer situation to immediately reward it.
The hexagram
困：亨，貞，大人吉，無咎。有言不信。
Oppression: success. Firm correctness for the great person — fortune. No fault. There are words, but they are not believed. — Translation by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese
“In (the condition denoted by) Khwăn there may (yet be) progress and success. For the firm and correct, the (really) great man, there will be good fortune. He will fall into no error. If he make speeches, his words cannot be made good.”
— 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.
臀困于株木，入于幽谷，三歲不覿。
The buttocks straitened under the stump of a tree. Entering a dark valley — for three years no sight of him.
“The first SIX, divided, shows its subject with bare buttocks straitened under the stump of a tree. He enters a dark valley, and for three years has no prospect (of deliverance).”
— Legge (1882)
Line 1 is the yin at the bottom of the lower trigram of water — the first position inside the exhaustion, where the actor is sitting on the stump of what used to be a tree. The image is humiliating and specific: the buttocks straitened on the rough wood of the stump, the actor sunk into a dark valley, three years passing with no prospect of being seen. The line names the most common founder failure inside oppression — accepting the lowest seat at the moment the resources have run out, and then disappearing into the kind of obscurity from which the network forgets the actor exists. The three years is not metaphor; it is the I Ching's blunt estimate of how long the dark-valley withdrawal can take to reverse.
In a decision context this is the line for the founder whose round did not close and who quietly stops answering investor emails; the executive whose role was sidelined and who stops attending the meetings they were no longer invited to lead; the writer whose project lost its champion and who simply stops shipping. The temptation at line 1 is to read the early stage of exhaustion as a signal to retreat into invisibility on the assumption that the situation will improve when seen with fresh eyes. The hexagram is explicit that the dark valley is not a productive retreat. Three years is the cost of misreading line 1 as a quiet sabbatical rather than as a structural withdrawal. The corrective is to refuse the lowest seat at the start: do not sit on the stump, do not enter the valley, hold visibility even at the cost of being seen in diminished circumstances.
困于酒食，朱紱方來，利用享祀。征凶，無咎。
Straitened amidst wine and viands. The red knee-covers of the ruler are just arriving. Advantageous to use sacrifice. Active campaigning brings evil — no fault.
“The second NINE, undivided, shows its subject straitened amidst his wine and viands. There come to him anon the red knee-covers (of the ruler). It will be well for him (to maintain his sincerity as) in sacrificing. Active operation (on his part) will lead to evil, but he will be free from blame.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 2 is the centred yang of the lower trigram and the first line in the hexagram where the actor is not yet structurally lost. The straitening is real — 困于酒食, straitened amidst wine and viands — but the image is paradoxical: the actor is exhausted in the middle of apparent abundance. The wine and food are present; what is missing is the appetite, the meaning, the use of the supply. The red knee-covers of the ruler are arriving — recognition is on the way, the institutional acknowledgement that has been delayed is approaching the actor's position. The instruction is to receive the arrival without converting it into a campaign. 利用享祀 — advantageous to use sacrifice — names the appropriate posture: sincerity, patience, ceremonial gravity rather than tactical mobilisation.
The decision-relevant translation is the lesson of the founder who has product-market-adjacent traction but is exhausted at the centre of it; the executive who has been formally promoted at exactly the moment they have lost conviction in the work; the writer whose contract is signed at the point they no longer believe the book matters. The hexagram is explicit that pushing forward at this altitude — 征 — brings evil. The recognition that is arriving cannot be amplified by aggressive campaigning; the campaign at line 2 reads to everyone in the room as the desperation it is. The 無咎 verdict — no fault — is conditioned on the actor receiving the red knee-covers with the gravity of sacrifice and refusing to convert the moment into a forward push. Founders who reach line 2 should slow the cadence, hold the ceremonial weight of the arrival, and let the institutional recognition do its own work without trying to leverage it on the spot.
困于石，據于蒺蔾，入于其宮，不見其妻，凶。
Straitened before the rock. Laying hold of thorns. Entering his palace and not seeing his wife — evil.
“The third SIX, divided, shows its subject straitened before a (frowning) rock. He lays hold of thorns. He enters his palace, and does not see his wife. There will be evil.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 3 is the catastrophic centre of the hexagram and one of the bluntest verdicts in the I Ching. Three failures stack at this position. 困于石 — straitened before a frowning rock; the obstacle in front of the actor is immovable and the actor has refused to recognise it. 據于蒺蔾 — laying hold of thorns; what the actor reaches for as support produces fresh injury. 入于其宮，不見其妻 — entering his palace, not seeing his wife; the actor returns to the home base expecting refuge and finds that the very relationship that was supposed to hold them has dissolved. The single-character verdict is 凶 — evil — the hexagram's most severe judgement, and the only such verdict in the entire reading.
The decision-relevant translation is the picture of the founder who has been told the wall is immovable and who keeps walking into it; the executive who responds to the lost authority by gripping the team harder and producing the team's departure; the leader who returns to the partner expecting domestic stability while the partner has already left. The hexagram is honest that the three failures at line 3 are not independent accidents; they are the structural consequence of a single error — the refusal to recognise that the situation is genuinely exhausted, and the attempt to substitute force for the missing resource. Reading line 3 cleanly is the most important interpretive move in the entire hexagram. The actor who recognises that the rock is immovable does not need to lay hold of the thorns; the actor who lays down the grip on the team does not return home to the empty palace. The corrective is severe in its honesty: the situation is not workable at the present force, and the only response that does not produce the line-3 verdict is to stop trying to work it.
來徐徐，困于金車，吝，有終。
Coming very slowly. Straitened by the carriage of metal. Occasion for regret — but the end is reached.
“The fourth NINE, undivided, shows its subject proceeding very slowly (to help the subject of the first line), who is straitened by the carriage of metal in front of him. There will be occasion for regret, but the end will be good.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 4 is the ying line of the hexagram — the receiving position — and the instruction names the right tempo of the rescue. The actor is moving to help the line-1 figure stranded in the dark valley, but the approach is slow: 來徐徐, coming very slowly. The cause of the delay is structural: 困于金車, straitened by the carriage of metal in front of the actor. The metal carriage is the I Ching's image of an obstruction that has institutional weight — a senior figure between the helper and the one to be helped, a corporate process blocking the rescue, a previous obligation the actor cannot abandon to move faster. The line concedes 吝 — occasion for regret — but is explicit that 有終 — the end is reached. The arrival is delayed but not denied.
The decision-relevant translation is generous to the senior who is trying to help the junior trapped in the line-1 dark valley but who cannot move at the speed the junior needs. The investor who wants to write a bridge cheque but is blocked by their fund's IC process; the executive who wants to pull a sidelined colleague back into the room but cannot move past the politics that benched them; the mentor whose student is in obvious distress and whose institutional schedule cannot be cleared on demand. The hexagram is honest about the cost — the regret is named — and is equally honest that the slow arrival is the correct posture. The line-4 actor who abandons their carriage of metal to sprint to the rescue arrives faster but without the institutional weight that makes the rescue stick. The 有終 verdict is unconditioned on the speed; it depends on the actor's willingness to bear the carriage of metal until the right moment for the slow arrival presents itself.
劓刖，困于赤紱，乃徐有說，利用祭祀。
Nose cut off and feet cut off. Straitened by the scarlet aprons. Yet slowly there is release. Advantageous to use sacrifice.
“The fifth NINE, undivided, shows its subject with his nose and feet cut off. He is straitened by (his ministers in their) scarlet aprons. He is leisurely in his movements, however, and is satisfied. It will be well for him to be (sincere) as in sacrificing (to spiritual beings).”
— Legge (1882)
Line 5 is the ruler line and the most severe image of authority in oppression. The actor at line 5 has been mutilated — 劓刖, nose and feet cut off — and the source of the injury is named explicitly: 困于赤紱, straitened by the scarlet aprons of the ministers. The great-person at line 5 is exhausted not by external enemies but by the institutional layer immediately below them, the very officials whose function was to support the ruler's authority. The image is severe and the diagnosis is structural. The principal has lost the operational levers — nose, the sense that reads the room, and feet, the ability to move — and the cause is internal. The line then names the corrective with unusual specificity. 乃徐有說 — yet slowly there is release. 利用祭祀 — advantageous to use sacrifice.
The decision-relevant translation is the CEO whose senior leadership team has hollowed out the role from below; the founder whose investors are formally still backing the company while their behaviour has cut off the operational reach; the executive whose board has not removed them but has stripped the authority that would let them lead. The hexagram is honest that the structural mutilation is real and the recovery cannot be forced. The corrective is twofold and counter-intuitive. First, slowness — 徐 — the only release named in the hexagram comes through deliberate non-urgency. The principal who responds to the scarlet-apron pressure by acting faster validates the mutilation; the principal who slows down forces the institutional layer to either restore the operational levers or expose itself as the cause. Second, sacrifice — 祭祀 — the ceremonial posture that signals to the room that the ruler retains the inner virtue even when the outer authority has been cut. The release at line 5 is the only structural exit in the hexagram, and it is conditioned on the principal refusing to fight the scarlet aprons on their terms.
困于葛藟，于臲卼，曰動悔。有悔，征吉。
Straitened by creepers, in a high and unstable place — saying, 'If I move, I shall regret it.' If he does repent of former errors, going forward brings fortune.
“The topmost SIX, divided, shows its subject straitened, as if bound with creepers; or in a high and dangerous position, and saying (to himself), 'If I move, I shall repent it.' If he do repent of former errors, there will be good fortune in his going forward.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 6 is the topmost line of Oppression and the position where the exhaustion has reached its outer limit. The image is doubled: 困于葛藟, bound by the creepers and vines that have grown over the actor while they were held in place; 于臲卼, perched in a high and unstable position from which any movement threatens collapse. The actor at line 6 has internalised the paralysis of the situation — 曰動悔, saying to themselves, 'If I move, I shall regret it.' The line then performs a precise inversion: 有悔，征吉 — if he does repent of former errors, going forward brings fortune. The exhaustion is real, the paralysis is real, the creepers are real — and the line is explicit that the corrective is the willingness to acknowledge that the previous posture produced the entanglement.
The decision-relevant translation is the founder who has been frozen at the top of a failing company because every move looks worse than holding still; the executive who is one step from the exit but cannot leave without admitting the previous strategy was the trap; the leader who is bound by commitments made in better moments and treats each commitment as a creeper that prevents motion. The hexagram is honest that this position is real. The high and unstable place is not paranoia; the previous moves did produce the entanglement, and any future move does carry risk. The corrective is the regret — 有悔 — not as performance but as a structural recognition that the path that led to line 6 cannot be reversed by continuing it. The fortune named is conditioned: it depends on the regret being real, the acknowledgement being internal rather than performed for an audience, and the forward motion being a clean break from the posture that produced the creepers. Founders who reach line 6 typically discover that the exit they could not take from line 6 alone becomes available the moment the previous direction is honestly disowned.
PostureResources exhausted · inner virtue surviving
Oppression puts Water below and Lake above. The lower trigram Kan is the abyss, the deep water that should be filling the lake; the upper trigram Dui is the lake itself, the body of water that should be visible on the surface. The image is unusually specific: the water has sunk out of the lake into the depths, the lake bed has run dry, the source has been cut off from what it should be sustaining. The character 困 sharpens the picture — a tree confined inside an enclosure, a living thing reduced to the space of the box that holds it. The Tuan compresses the structural diagnosis into a single phrase: 剛揜也 — the firm is covered. The strength is present in the configuration; the configuration has buried it.
The hexagram statement is unusually layered. The first four clauses are confidently positive: 亨，貞，大人吉，無咎 — success, firm correctness, fortune for the great person, no fault. The fifth clause is the diagnostic that defines the hexagram: 有言不信 — there are words, but they are not believed. In oppression the actor’s communication has lost its weight. The voice that was authoritative is heard but does not move the room; the founder’s pitch lands and does not convert; the leader’s instruction is received and not followed. The Tuan closes with the ethical corollary: 尚口乃窮 — esteeming the mouth then exhausts. The discipline of oppression is not to argue louder. The discipline is to let the inner virtue survive the interval in which words do not carry, and to wait for the configuration to rebuild the conditions in which speech can again do its work.
The Xiang commentary names the working posture in four characters: 致命遂志 — stake life to carry out the aim. The noble person inside oppression does not preserve themselves by lowering the aim to the level the resources permit; they preserve the aim at the cost of the resources. The picture is severe and is meant to be. Oppression is the hexagram in which the outer scaffold has been stripped and the only structural ground that remains is the actor’s commitment to what the work was for in the first place.
Failure modesSpeaking when words won't carry · sitting on thorns (line 3)
The dominant failure mode is the line-3 forcing posture — the refusal to read the exhaustion as structural, the substitution of force for the missing resource. The actor walks into the immovable rock, lays hold of the thorns that produce fresh injury, returns to the palace expecting refuge and finds the wife already gone. The hexagram’s only outright 凶 verdict concentrates here, and the diagnosis is uncompromising: the three failures are not independent accidents but the single structural consequence of refusing to accept that the situation is genuinely exhausted. The secondary failure mode is the line-1 dark-valley withdrawal — the actor who accepts the lowest seat at the start of the exhaustion and disappears into the obscurity from which the network forgets they exist. Three years is the I Ching’s blunt estimate of that cost. The tertiary failure mode is the line-2 desperation campaign — the actor who receives the institutional recognition that was slowly arriving and converts it into an aggressive push that reads to the room as exactly the desperation it is. All three failures share the same root: a misreading of the speech-failure clause of the hexagram statement, and the attempt to compensate for words that will not carry by speaking louder, faster, or more often.
Application & adjacentQuestion shape · Hexagram 48 pair · The well that follows oppression
A note on the question shape this hexagram answers best. Oppression rewards questions framed around a specific resource-exhausted moment — the runway that has run out, the authority that has been hollowed by the team below, the project whose champion has been removed, the relationship that no longer responds to the actor's voice. It is less useful for vague questions about whether the work is meaningful; for that question, re-read with Hexagrams 18 — Corruption — or 25 — Innocence — depending on whether the question is about inherited dysfunction or about original purpose. Oppression presumes the exhaustion is present and material. The hexagram is the instruction layer for what to do once the outer scaffold has fallen and the inner virtue is what remains.
The canonical adjacent reading is Hexagram 48 — The Well — the King Wen pair to Oppression. Where Hexagram 47 names the moment the lake’s water has sunk out of reach and the surface has run dry, Hexagram 48 names the well that draws water from the depth the lake could not hold — the structural source that does not depend on the conditions that exhausted the lake. The pair tells a precise story: oppression is the hexagram of resources exhausted at the visible surface; the well is the hexagram of resources accessed from below the surface that the exhaustion never reached. Reading 47 alone leaves the actor inside the dry lake; reading 47 with 48 in view tells the actor what to dig for. The line-5 release at 乃徐有說 — slowly there is release — is the hexagram’s structural pointer to 48: the slow exit from oppression is the descent to the well that the lake had stopped touching. Founders and executives who keep both hexagrams in view tend to read exhaustion as a signal to dig rather than as a signal to push.
The line-3 verdict is the hexagram’s operational centre and its severest instruction. The single 凶 in the entire reading concentrates at the position of the actor who refuses to recognise the rock, lays hold of the thorns, and returns to the empty palace. The decision-relevant move is unsentimental: the actor inside oppression must read the immovable obstacle as structurally immovable, must lay down the grip that produces fresh injury, and must accept that the home base may not hold the refuge it previously offered. The line-5 corrective — 徐, slowness, and 祭祀, sacrificial sincerity — is the only structural exit named in the hexagram, and it is conditioned on the principal refusing to fight the scarlet aprons on their terms. The line-6 reversal is conditioned on the willingness to disown the posture that produced the creepers. Across all three corrections the underlying instruction is the same: do not try to recover oppression by speaking; let the inner virtue survive the dry interval, and stake life on the aim while the configuration rebuilds the ground on which words can again carry.
SynthesisYiGram Editorial
Each Western line of reading approaches Oppression from a different angle. James Legge transliterates 困 as “Khwăn” and frames the hexagram within his Confucian moral lens — the canonical instruction about firm correctness under straitened circumstances, with the speech-failure clause read as the moral test of the great person whose words can no longer be made good. Richard Wilhelm’s symbolic-philosophical posture reads the hexagram as “Oppression” or “Exhaustion” in the more general sense — the great image of the dry lake and the noble person who stakes life to carry out the aim. A reading in the lineage of Carl Jung’s 1949 foreword would treat 47 as a marker of psychic exhaustion — the libido that has sunk out of the conscious lake into the depths from which only a deliberate slowness can call it back. Bradford Hatcher’s linguistic project (below) abandons all three framings and returns to the semantic field of 困 itself — surrounded, afflicted, beset, trapped, oppressed, the full vocabulary range of confinement and depletion. 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 47 困, his clusters are:
Surrounded, afflicted, beset, distressed, trapped, oppressed, cramped, hemmed in Hard pressed, squeezed; feeling defeated; running on reserves, vapors and fumes Victimized, bothered, disheartened, wretched, depleted, fatigued, weary, used up Lowest ebbs, dregs, being drained, spent; futility, pessimism, nihilism, suffering Depression; using the last ounce, getting the spirit back, lightening up, enduring Melancholy, delirium, illusion, despond, swamp gas visions, wits end, emptiness
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 47 names a very specific working posture: a moment in which external resources have failed and the actor’s speech has lost its weight, and the corresponding discipline of preserving the inner virtue while the configuration rebuilds the conditions in which words can again carry. The Wings give the canonical reading: the firm is covered, peril yet delight, oppressed yet not losing what makes for success; the lake without water, the noble person stakes life to carry out the aim. Wang Bi sharpens the structural reading: 困 is not a hexagram about external misfortune but about the loss of communicative weight, and the line-by-line texts describe specific altitudes at which the actor either accepts the speech failure honestly or attempts to compensate for it with force. Zhu Xi reframes the hexagram around the line-5 乃徐有說 — the slow release — treating deliberate non-urgency as the only structural exit from a position the institutional layer has hollowed out, and naming the line-3 evil as the consequence of refusing to recognise the exhaustion as real. The divinatory manual Bushi Zhengzong reads 47 strictly as the marker for active resource exhaustion, lost authority, runway crises, or moments in which the actor’s communication is genuinely no longer landing — not as commentary on the actor’s inner state of mind. The unified posture across all four sources is the same: Oppression is a discipline for surviving the dry interval, refusing the forcing posture at line 3, accepting the slow release at line 5, and letting the configuration rebuild the ground before speaking again.
Yi ZhuanTuan + Xiang · Ten Wings
The Ten Wings are the canonical Confucian commentary stratum embedded in the received Yijing. For Hexagram 47 the two most directly relevant Wings are the Tuan Zhuan (彖傳, the Judgement Commentary) and the Xiang Zhuan (象傳, the Image Commentary).
Tuan 彖傳: 困，剛揜也。險以說，困而不失其所亨，其唯君子乎。貞大人吉，以剛中也。有言不信，尚口乃窮也。
Oppression: the firm is covered. Peril yet delight; oppressed yet not losing what makes for success — only the noble person, surely? “Firm correctness for the great person, fortune” — the firm at the centre. “There are words but no one believes” — esteeming the mouth then exhausts.
Xiang 象傳: 澤無水，困。君子以致命遂志。
The lake without water — Oppression. The noble person accordingly stakes life to carry out his aim.
The Tuan does the structural work: the firm-is-covered diagnosis names the hexagram’s root condition — the strength is present in the configuration but buried by it — and the peril-with-delight clause locates the working posture inside that condition. The same Wing names the speech-failure clause as the hexagram’s ethical instruction: 尚口乃窮, esteeming the mouth then exhausts, treating the attempt to compensate for lost communicative weight by speaking more as the structural error the hexagram exists to correct. The Xiang compresses the whole hexagram into a four-character ethical instruction: 致命遂志 — stake life to carry out the aim — treating the survival of the inner virtue under exhaustion as the only ground from which the configuration can rebuild. Translations by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese.
Classical commentariesWang Bi · Zhu Xi · Bushi Zhengzong
Wang Bi (Zhouyi Zhu, 3rd century) reads Hexagram 47 as a hexagram about the loss of communicative weight rather than about external misfortune. For Wang Bi the analytical centre is the 有言不信 clause — words spoken but not believed — and the line-by-line texts describe specific altitudes at which the actor either accepts the speech failure as structural or attempts to push against it. The line-3 evil, in Wang Bi’s reading, is the consequence of substituting force for the missing communicative authority; the rock is immovable, the thorns produce injury, and the empty palace is the receipt of an actor who refused to recognise that the situation could not be argued back into shape.
Zhu Xi (Zhouyi Benyi, 1188) reframes the hexagram around the line-5 乃徐有說 clause — the slow release — treating deliberate non-urgency as the only structural exit from a position the institutional layer has hollowed out. For Zhu Xi the principal at line 5 is exhausted by the scarlet aprons of the ministers below, the very layer whose function was to support the authority; the corrective cannot be aggressive reassertion of the authority, because the aggressive posture validates the mutilation. The slowness combined with sacrificial sincerity — 利用祭祀 — is the precise ceremonial posture that signals to the room that the inner virtue has survived even while the outer levers are gone. Zhu Xi reads the line-3 evil as the structural counter-example: where line 5 is rewarded for slowness, line 3 is condemned for force.
The Bushi Zhengzong (Qing-dynasty divinatory manual, 1709) reads 47 practically: a hexagram drawn in answer to a question about an active resource crisis — runway exhaustion, lost authority, organisational hollowing, public visibility collapse, creative drought, the moment when the actor’s voice no longer moves the room. The manual is explicit that 47 is not commentary on whether the actor is in the right; the cast applies whether the actor is the exhausted principal, the founder who has run out of money, or the leader whose team has stopped following. The practical recommendation tracks the line position the question lands at: refuse the dark valley at line 1; receive the slow recognition at line 2 without campaigning; recognise the immovable rock at line 3 rather than walking into it; bear the carriage of metal at line 4 even at the cost of regret; take the slow release at line 5 with sacrificial sincerity; disown the previous posture at line 6 to clear the creepers.
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: Dui (lake / metal), first-generation (兌宫一世). Binary, bottom-up: 010110. Lower trigram: Kan (water). Upper trigram: Dui (lake). Shi line: 1. Ying line: 4.
The line branches, bottom-up, follow the Kan-below / Dui-above najia composition for Oppression: 寅 (line 1), 辰 (line 2), 午 (line 3), 亥 (line 4), 酉 (line 5), 未 (line 6). Read against the Dui palace, whose element is metal, the six-relatives assignments are: line 1 寅 (wood) — wealth (妻財); line 2 辰 (earth) — parents (父母); line 3 午 (fire) — officials (官鬼); line 4 亥 (water) — offspring (子孫); line 5 酉 (metal) — siblings (兄弟); line 6 未 (earth) — parents (父母).
The shi line at position 1 carries wealth (寅, wood), the element that the Dui palace’s metal overcomes — the actor at the shi line stands on the resource that the palace’s own nature is structurally positioned to consume. This is the najia correlate of the line-1 dark-valley image: the actor at the lowest position holds the wealth-relation to the palace, but the palace’s metal nature exhausts that wealth at the point of contact. The ying line at position 4 carries offspring (亥, water), the element that the palace’s metal generates — the receiving position is the line-4 figure whose slow approach to rescue is what the palace produces rather than consumes. Read as a structural pair, the shi-ying axis of Oppression says that the actor at the lowest position stands on a resource the palace exhausts, while the receiving position is the generative outflow the palace produces — the structural correlate of theTuan’s 剛揜: the firm is covered, the wealth is consumed, and the only generative motion in the configuration travels from the palace toward the receiving line above.
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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