Hexagram 48井Well
Wind below, water above — wood reaching into the spring. The town may be changed, the well cannot. Hexagram 48 is the canonical instruction for the source that serves whoever draws from it: institutional knowledge, deep relationships, cultural infrastructure, the commons beneath the consumption. The practical question is not how much is drawn but whether the source is maintained, whether the bucket holds, whether the rope reaches all the way to the water.
60-second read
The Well is the hexagram for the structural source that remains while everything around it changes. The hexagram statement is concise and severe: the town may move, the well cannot. Without loss, without gain, those who come and go use the well. The two named failure modes are exact — almost reaching the water but the rope falls short, or breaking the bucket at the lip. The discipline is maintenance of the source itself, not the consumption from it. The well does not exhaust; the bucket and the rope do.
The hexagram
井：改邑不改井，無喪無得，往來井井。汔至，亦未繘井，羸其瓶，凶。
The Well. The town may be changed; the well cannot. Without loss, without gain; those who come and those who go use the well. If you almost reach the water but the rope does not reach the well, or if you break the bucket — evil. — Translation by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese
“(Looking at) Tsing, (we think of) how (the site of) a town may be changed, while (the fashion of) its wells undergoes no change. (The water of a well) never disappears and never receives (any great) increase, and those who come and those who go can draw and enjoy the benefit. If (the drawing) have nearly been accomplished, but, before the rope has quite reached the water, the bucket is broken, this is evil.”
— 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.
井泥不食，舊井無禽。
The well is muddy and not drunk from; the old well has no birds.
“The first SIX, divided, shows a well so muddy that men will not drink of it; or an old well to which neither birds (resort), (nor any animals come).”
— Legge (1882)
Line 1 is the yin at the very bottom of the well, the line where the source has been allowed to silt up. The image is unsparing: 井泥不食 — the well is muddy and not drunk from. The water is there in principle; the rim is intact; the position still notionally counts as a well. But the maintenance has not been done at the bottom, the sediment has reached the level where the water becomes unusable, and the practical fact is that no one draws from it any more. The second clause sharpens the picture into permanence — 舊井無禽 — the old well no longer attracts even birds. The source has fallen out of the ecology that recognised it as a source.
In a decision context this is the line for the institutional knowledge that has not been refreshed, the deep relationship that has been allowed to silt up with neglect, the founding document that no one in the current company has read, the customer base that was once a moat and now does not respond to outreach. The line is honest that the failure happened at the bottom — at the lowest, most foundational layer — and that the consequence is structural rather than rhetorical. Founders and executives who hit line 1 typically discover that the source they thought they could draw from no longer responds, and that the corrective is not surface re-engagement but the slow work of dredging the bottom. The line does not promise that the dredging will succeed; it names that without it the well is finished.
井谷射鮒，甕敝漏。
The well runs through a hole to the minnows; the jar is broken and leaks.
“The second NINE, undivided, shows a well from which by a hole the water escapes and flows away to the shrimps (and such small creatures among the grass), or one the water of which leaks away from a broken jar.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 2 is the centred yang of the lower trigram and the line where there is genuine water at the bottom, but the containment fails. The image is structurally precise: 井谷射鮒 — the well runs through a hole to the minnows. The water is real; the source has not silted up like line 1; but the side of the well has cracked and the water diverts to the small creatures in the grass rather than rising into the vessel that would serve the village. The second clause names the parallel failure inside the vessel itself — 甕敝漏, the jar is broken and leaks. Water from a real source, lost on the way up.
The decision-relevant translation is honest about the operator who has the source but not the containment. The institutional knowledge exists but no one has documented it; the deep customer relationship is real but the account management is leaking it to side conversations; the founding capability is intact but the ops layer between the capability and the customer is cracked, and the value escapes sideways into noise rather than reaching the people the source was meant to serve. For founders this is the line of the company whose product is excellent and whose go-to-market vessel is broken. The corrective is not to dig a new well — the source is fine — but to repair the side of the existing one and to mend the jar that carries the water up. The line is unsentimental: until the containment is fixed, the source feeds the minnows.
井渫不食，為我心惻，可用汲。王明，並受其福。
The well has been cleared but is not drunk from. My heart is grieved for this. It could be used to draw water. If the king were bright, both he and we would receive the blessing.
“The third NINE, undivided, shows a well, which has been cleared out, but is not used. Our hearts are sorry for this, but it might be used to draw water from. If the king were (only) intelligent, both he and we might receive the benefit of it.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 3 is the top of the lower trigram and the most poignant line in the hexagram. The maintenance work has been done — 井渫, the well has been dredged — and the source is clean, usable, ready. But 不食 — it is not drunk from. The work is complete and the water remains undrawn. The line then names the affect directly: 為我心惻, my heart is grieved for this. The Yijing does not often register the inner state of the speaker this nakedly; line 3 of 井 does, because the failure here is not a failure of the source but a failure of recognition.
The decision-relevant translation is the line of the maintained capability that has not been seen. The technical team that has built the platform and waits to be commissioned; the senior operator who has refreshed the practice and waits to be given the work; the well-kept relationship that has not been called on; the documentation that has been written and not been read. The line names the appropriate response — 可用汲, it could be used to draw water — and then locates the structural exit at the line-5 ruler: 王明, if the king were bright. The fortune is conditioned on someone with authority seeing the cleared well and commissioning it. For maintained capabilities waiting on recognition, the line is honest: do not stop the maintenance; do not falsify a new claim to attract attention; the work is correct; the grief is permitted; the fortune arrives when the bright ruler reads what has been kept.
井甃，無咎。
The well is lined with stone. No error.
“The fourth SIX, divided, shows a well, the lining of which is well laid. There will be no error.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 4 is the most compressed line in the hexagram: four characters, the verdict of no error. 井甃 — the well is lined with stone. The line names the work that nobody draws water from directly and that without which the well cannot function. The stone lining is what prevents the sides from collapsing back into the bottom in the way line 1 described; it is what stops the cracks that line 2 named; it is what holds the column of water against the surrounding earth long enough for the rope and bucket to do their work above. The line is honest that this is invisible labour. The verdict is not great fortune; the verdict is no error.
For decision-makers this is the line of the structural maintenance that does not produce output and that protects every output that follows. The platform team that does not ship customer-facing features and without which the customer-facing features would not run; the editorial standards process that does not publish and without which nothing published would have integrity; the documentation refactor that adds no new content and without which the new content cannot land. The hexagram is explicit at line 4: the no-error verdict is the appropriate accounting. The lining work does not get the song; it prevents the collapse. Founders and executives who learn to read line 4 cleanly stop expecting visible fortune from invisible discipline. The right response is to do the work, accept the unspectacular verdict, and trust that the well above the lining can now hold.
井冽，寒泉食。
The well is clear; the cold spring is drunk from.
“The fifth NINE, undivided, shows a clear, limpid well, (the waters from) whose cold spring are (freely) drunk.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 5 is the ruler line and the line where the well is doing what a well is for. The image is the cleanest in the hexagram: 井冽, the well is clear; 寒泉食, the cold spring is drunk from. The maintenance at the bottom held; the lining at line 4 protected the column; the cleared source at line 3 has finally been recognised; and at line 5 the water is rising as a cold clean spring that the village drinks from without commentary. The fortune is implicit rather than named. The line does not say 大吉 or 元吉. The work has reached the state where the description of the function is the whole of the verdict.
The decision-relevant translation is the line of the source that is being drawn from properly, by the right people, at the right cadence, with the right respect for the temperature of the water. For founders this is the company at the moment when the institutional knowledge is being read, the deep relationships are being called on, the cultural commons is being maintained and used. The line is uncommonly understated: it does not promise expansion, it does not promise greatness, it promises that the cold spring is drunk from. The discipline implicit in the image is to keep the well clear — the line names the cleanness as the operative property — and to let the drawing happen at its own pace. The well at line 5 does not market itself; the spring is cold and the village drinks.
井收，勿幕，有孚元吉。
The well is drawn from; do not cover it. There is sincerity — primal good fortune.
“The topmost SIX, divided, shows the water from the well brought to the top, which is not allowed to be covered. (The fortune symbolised) is associated with the existence of sincerity, and there will be great good fortune.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 6 is the topmost line of the well — the rim, the moment when the water has been brought all the way up and is available at the surface where the village stands. 井收 — the well is drawn from. The instruction at this altitude is the most direct in the hexagram: 勿幕, do not cover it. The well, once it functions, is to remain open to whoever needs to draw. The line then names the precondition of the only primal good fortune in the reading: 有孚, there is sincerity. 元吉 — primal good fortune — concentrates at this position because the sincerity at the open rim is the structural property that makes the entire well system work as a commons rather than as a private resource.
The decision-relevant translation is severe and corrective for the operator who has succeeded at lines 1 through 5 and is now tempted to gate the source. The institutional knowledge that has been refreshed; the deep relationship infrastructure that has been maintained; the cultural commons that has been kept clean — all of it, at line 6, asks not to be covered. Founders who reach line 6 typically discover that the most lucrative short-term move is to enclose the well, charge for the drawing, restrict access to the rim. The hexagram is explicit that this move forfeits the only primal good fortune in the reading. The well is a commons; the sincerity at the open rim is what makes it one; the primal fortune attaches to the keeper who refuses to cover it. The line is the I Ching's most precise picture of the moral structure of sources: maintained at every altitude, drunk from by whoever comes, the bucket reaching all the way down and the rim left honest.
PostureTown changes · the well does not · source maintenance
The Well puts Wind (Xun) below and Water (Kan) above. The lower trigram is the wood — the rope and the bucket — reaching into the upper trigram’s water. The image is unusually concrete and unusually intimate: the villager standing at the rim, the wooden vessel lowered through the column of dark water, the rope drawing the bucket back up. The Tuan commentary compresses the mechanism into a phrase: 巽乎水而上水 — penetrating into water and bringing it up. That is the hexagram’s whole picture of a source: the wood enters the water; the water comes up; the wooden vessel and the rope are the operative machinery, and the well itself is the standing structure that makes the machinery possible.
The hexagram statement is one of the most direct in the received text. 改邑不改井 — the town may be changed, the well cannot. The village can relocate; the institutional name can change; the headline can be re-written; the source itself, dug into the structural ground, does not relocate. The next clause is even more important for decision work: 無喪無得 — without loss, without gain. The well does not get richer when the village is prosperous; it does not get poorer when the village is in famine. The accounting that applies to consumption does not apply to the source. The third clause closes the loop: 往來井井 — those who come and those who go use the well. The source is structurally indifferent to membership; it serves whoever draws from it.
The Xiang commentary then makes the prescription operational. 木上有水，井 — water above wood, the Well. 君子以勞民勸相 — the noble person accordingly encourages labour among the people and urges mutual help. The whole hexagram, read together, is the I Ching’s warning that sources are maintained through ordinary continuous labour and through the culture of mutual help that keeps the well clear. The discipline is not heroic; the discipline is the everyday work of dredging the bottom, lining the sides, clearing the rim, mending the bucket, and refusing to cover the opening when the water is finally drawn.
Failure modesMuddy well (line 1) · broken bucket / rope falls short
The dominant failure mode is the one named twice in the hexagram statement itself. 汔至，亦未繘井 — almost reaching the water but the rope does not go all the way. The operator has done most of the work and has stopped one altitude short of the source: the documentation is written but the last cross-reference is missing; the customer-relationship work is excellent up to but not including the renewal conversation; the institutional knowledge has been refreshed at every layer except the foundational one. The line-1 muddy-well picture is the most acute form of this: the source has been allowed to silt up at the bottom, and the entire upper structure becomes ornamental. The second failure is the broken bucket: 羸其瓶 — the containment vessel has failed at the lip, and the water that was successfully drawn is lost at the point of transfer to the people the source was meant to serve. Both failures share a root: an operator who attended to the visible parts of the well system and neglected either the foundation below or the vessel at the top. The hexagram is explicit that either failure produces the same verdict — 凶, evil — because both make the source structurally inaccessible to the people who arrived to draw from it.
Application & adjacentQuestion shape · Hexagram 47 pair · Institutional knowledge as the source
A note on the question shape this hexagram answers best. The Well rewards questions framed around a specific source that the actor is maintaining or accessing — institutional knowledge that the company depends on, a deep customer relationship that has been the moat for years, a cultural commons that the team draws from, an editorial archive, a senior practitioner whose knowledge has not been documented, a founding capability that the company has stopped refreshing. It is less useful for vague questions about whether the actor should be more generous; for that question, re-read with Hexagrams 42 — Increase — or 11 — Peace — depending on whether the question is about giving or about steady abundance. The Well presumes there is a structural source. The hexagram is the instruction layer for how to keep that source open.
The canonical adjacent reading is Hexagram 47 — 困 Oppression — the King Wen pair to The Well and its structural inverse on the source question. Where Hexagram 47 names the moment when the external resources are exhausted and the actor must hold integrity through the constraint without help arriving, Hexagram 48 names the structural source that remains underneath every such exhaustion: the well that the town does not exhaust, the spring that does not lose or gain with the prosperity of the village above. Read together the pair tells a clean story. Hexagram 47 is the surface exhaustion; Hexagram 48 is the source that survives the exhaustion. Founders and operators who keep both hexagrams in view stop confusing the temporary depletion of working capital with the loss of the foundational capability, and stop confusing the abundance of the source with permission to neglect its maintenance. The two hexagrams together are the I Ching’s instruction layer for the relationship between consumption and source.
The operational centre of the hexagram is the discipline that runs across lines 3, 4, and 5: the cleared source that waits to be recognised, the stone lining that does the invisible work, and the cold spring that is finally drunk from. The decision-relevant move for the institutional operator is to do the maintenance even when the line-3 grief is acute and the recognition has not yet arrived; to accept the line-4 no-error verdict as the appropriate accounting for invisible structural work; and to read the line-5 cleanness as the operative property of a source that is being drawn from properly. The line-6 instruction — 勿幕, do not cover it — is the test that distinguishes the founder who maintained the well as a commons from the founder who maintained it as a private resource. The primal good fortune in the hexagram attaches only to the open rim.
SynthesisYiGram Editorial
Each Western line of reading approaches The Well from a different angle. James Legge transliterates 井 as “Tsing” and frames the hexagram within his Confucian moral lens — the canonical instruction about the village well as the institutional emblem of a source that does not change while the town above it does, with the broken-bucket clause read strictly as the warning against effort wasted at the last altitude. Richard Wilhelm’s symbolic-philosophical posture reads the hexagram as “The Well” in the more general sense of the inexhaustible source — the cultural infrastructure of a community, the deep ground that nourishes the surface life of the town without itself being consumed. A reading in the lineage of Carl Jung’s 1949 foreword would treat 48 as a marker of the psychic source — the deep well of the unconscious from which the conscious life draws — with the line-6 open-rim instruction read as the integrative relation of the conscious surface to the deep source. Bradford Hatcher’s linguistic project (below) abandons all three framings and returns to the semantic field of 井 itself — source, plenum, spring, cistern, the full vocabulary range of the accessible reservoir. 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 48 井, his clusters are:
Source, plenum, spring, cistern, fountain, tap, pools; center, hub, nucleus, nexus Meeting place, commons; common ground, sources and pools; interdependence Basic service & maintenance; utility taken for granted, maintaining links to source Basic needs, truths, constants; replenishment, providence; be accessible, available Resourcefulness, resources at your disposal, getting to plenty; there to draw upon Developing character around deeper core; self-sufficiency, -reliance, -cultivation
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 48 names a very specific working posture: a source that stands beneath every change in the town above it, and the corresponding discipline of maintaining the source itself rather than measuring its consumption. The Wings give the canonical reading: penetrating into water and bringing it up, the well nourishes without exhaustion, the firm at the centre is what makes the town-changing / well-not-changing distinction structural, the broken bucket is the picture of effort wasted at the last altitude. Wang Bi sharpens the structural reading: 井 is not a hexagram about generosity but about the architecture of a source — the bottom that must not silt up, the sides that must not crack, the lining that protects the column, the bucket and rope that must reach all the way. Zhu Xi reframes the hexagram around the line-5 cold spring as the realised state of the system and reads the line-6 勿幕 instruction as the ethical climax: the well is a commons, and the sincerity at the open rim is what keeps it one. The divinatory manual Bushi Zhengzong reads 48 strictly as the marker for a source the actor is maintaining or accessing — institutional knowledge, deep relationships, cultural infrastructure — rather than as commentary on whether the actor is generous in character. The unified posture across all four sources is the same: the Well is a discipline for keeping the source clear, lining the column, refusing to cover the rim, and trusting that the cold spring will be drunk from when the maintenance is real.
Yi ZhuanTuan + Xiang · Ten Wings
The Ten Wings are the canonical Confucian commentary stratum embedded in the received Yijing. For Hexagram 48 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: 巽乎水而上水，井。井養而不窮也。改邑不改井，乃以剛中也。汔至亦未繘井，未有功也。羸其瓶，是以凶也。
Penetrating into water and bringing it up — the Well. The Well nourishes without exhaustion. “Changing the town but not the well” — because the firm is at the centre. “Almost reached but the rope does not reach the well” — no merit has been gained. “Breaks the bucket” — this is why there is evil.
Xiang 象傳: 木上有水，井。君子以勞民勸相。
Water above wood — the Well. The noble person accordingly encourages labour among the people and urges mutual help.
The Tuan does the structural work: the wood-entering-water / water-rising mechanism is what makes the well a source rather than a container, and the line-5 firm at the centre is what gives the hexagram its town-may-change / well-does-not-change architecture. The same Wing reads the failure modes of the hexagram statement strictly: 未有功 — no merit has been gained — is the verdict on the rope that falls short, and the broken bucket produces evil because the effort has been spent without reaching the people the source was meant to serve. The Xiang compresses the whole hexagram into a six-character ethical instruction: 勞民勸相 — encourage labour among the people, urge mutual help — treating the culture of ordinary continuous labour and mutual aid as the structural condition under which a source can continue to function. Translations by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese.
Classical commentariesWang Bi · Zhu Xi · Bushi Zhengzong
Wang Bi (Zhouyi Zhu, 3rd century) reads Hexagram 48 as a hexagram about the architecture of a source. For Wang Bi the analytical centre is the structural reading of the six lines as a vertical section through the well itself: line 1 is the silted bottom, line 2 is the cracked side, line 3 is the cleared but unrecognised source, line 4 is the stone lining, line 5 is the cold clean column, line 6 is the open rim. The hexagram’s decision logic, in Wang Bi’s reading, is the precise mapping of the altitudes at which a source can fail and of the corresponding maintenance work required to keep each altitude functioning.
Zhu Xi (Zhouyi Benyi, 1188) reframes the hexagram around the line-5 井冽，寒泉食 clause as the realised state of the whole system — the cold clean spring drunk from without commentary is the picture of a well that is doing what a well is for — and reads the line-6 勿幕 instruction as the ethical climax of the hexagram. For Zhu Xi the sincerity at the open rim is the structural property that distinguishes a commons from a private resource, and the only 元吉 — primal good fortune — in the reading concentrates at line 6 precisely because covering the well at the moment of its highest functioning forfeits the entire moral architecture the previous five lines built.
The Bushi Zhengzong (Qing-dynasty divinatory manual, 1709) reads 48 practically: a hexagram drawn in answer to a question about a source the actor is maintaining or accessing — institutional knowledge, a deep customer relationship, a founding capability, the cultural commons of a team, an editorial archive, a senior practitioner’s undocumented expertise, a long-held trade reputation. The manual is explicit that 48 is not a commentary on whether the actor is generous; the cast applies whether the actor is the keeper of the source or someone arriving to draw from it. The practical recommendation tracks the line position the question lands at: dredge the bottom at line 1; repair the side and the bucket at line 2; do not stop the maintenance at line 3 even when the recognition has not arrived; accept the no-error verdict for the invisible lining work at line 4; let the cold spring be drunk from at line 5; refuse to cover the rim 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: Zhen (thunder / wood), fifth-generation (震宫五世). Binary, bottom-up: 011010. Lower trigram: Xun (wind). Upper trigram: Kan (water). Shi line: 5. Ying line: 2.
The line branches, bottom-up, follow the Xun-below / Kan-above najia composition for The Well: 丑 (line 1), 亥 (line 2), 酉 (line 3), 申 (line 4), 戌 (line 5), 子 (line 6). Read against the Zhen palace, whose element is wood, the six-relatives assignments are: line 1 丑 (earth) — wealth (妻財); line 2 亥 (water) — parents (父母); line 3 酉 (metal) — officials (官鬼); line 4 申 (metal) — officials (官鬼); line 5 戌 (earth) — wealth (妻財); line 6 子 (water) — parents (父母).
The shi line at position 5 carries wealth (戌, earth), the element that the Zhen palace’s own wood overcomes — the actor at the shi line stands above the element the palace structurally regulates, the najia correlate of the line-5 ruler-position cold-spring picture in which the well is finally doing what a well is for. The ying line at position 2 carries parents (亥, water), the element that generates the palace’s own wood. Read as a structural pair, the shi-ying axis of the Well says that the ruler at line 5 stands over the regulated wealth element while the receiving position at line 2 is the generative water from which the palace’s wood itself draws — the structural correlate of the Tuan’s 巽乎水而上水: the wood enters water and the water comes up. The hexagram’s static layer mirrors its image.
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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