Qian (乾): from hidden dragon to overreach

Six yang lines, heaven over heaven

Qian (乾) is the first hexagram of the Zhouyi: six unbroken yang lines, counted from the bottom as first, second, third, fourth, fifth and top. It is built from two trigrams, and both are Qian, which is why it is read as Qian above Qian. The Shuogua gives the trigram one word, "strength", and its image is heaven.

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Qian and its inverse Kun: the inverse changes every line to the opposite polarity.

A four-word judgment: yuan, heng, li, zhen

The judgment of Qian is four words, yuan heng li zhen. Literally, yuan is the beginning or the greatest, heng is passing through freely, li is what suits, and zhen is staying with what is right.

Great is the primal power of Qian: the ten thousand things take their start from it, and it governs heaven. Clouds move and rain falls; the many kinds of things take their forms.

The Commentary on the Judgments first singles out yuan for praise: everything takes its start from it. There are two ways to divide the four words: as two phrases, "yuan heng" and "li zhen", or as four separate virtues. The Wenyan takes the second and explains the words one by one; that is the "four virtues of Qian" that later writers keep mentioning. Both readings are in use, so say which one you follow when you speak of Qian's judgment.

The Image: heaven moves with strength

The Image for Qian says: heaven moves with strength; the noble person strengthens the self without rest. The Great Images follow a fixed pattern: first the natural image from the two trigrams together, then what a noble person (in some hexagrams the ancient kings, a ruler or a great person) takes from it as a way of acting. Qian over Qian is heaven, whose movement does not stop, so the noble person strengthens the self and does not rest.

The same pattern gives Kun its Image: the earth's condition is receptive; the noble person carries things with ample virtue. Read the two side by side: Qian takes the movement of heaven, Kun the lay of the earth, and one ends on strengthening the self without rest while the other ends on carrying things with ample virtue.

Six lines: from the hidden dragon to the overreaching one

In the six line statements the subject is nearly always a dragon, and the dragon's position moves up one step at a time. After each statement the Small Image (小象) gives a short comment.

The first line sits at the bottom and the dragon hides: "do not act". The second line has it appear in the fields: "fitting to meet a great person". The third line changes the subject to a "noble person", who works all day and stays wary at night: "danger, but no blame". The fourth line says "perhaps leaping, perhaps in the depths". The fifth line, "a flying dragon in the sky", is the fullest position. The top line, "an overreaching dragon will regret", gets this comment: "fullness cannot last".

Qian and Kun: the inverse, the sequence and how to read

Change every line of Qian to the opposite polarity and you get Kun; this pairing is called the inverse hexagram (错卦). Turn Qian upside down and it is still Qian, so its reversed hexagram (综卦) is itself, and its nuclear hexagram (互卦) is also Qian. The Xu Gua begins with "only when there were heaven and earth did the ten thousand things come to be", and the traditional commentators match heaven and earth to Qian and Kun, which is why they stand at the head of the sixty-four.