Wuwang: thunder under heaven, one phrase and five words

Thunder under heaven: Qian above, Zhen below

Wuwang (无妄) is the 25th hexagram: Zhen (thunder) below, Qian (heaven) above. The yang lines are at the first, fourth, fifth and top places, and only the second and third are yin. The Shuo Gua says "Qian is strength" and "Zhen is moving", and the Commentary on the Judgments pairs the two words as "it moves and is strong".

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Wuwang beside its reversed hexagram Daxu: turn Wuwang over and you have Daxu.

The two characters of the name are not only a title. They come back inside the statements, in line one, line three, line five and the top line, and each time the word that follows is different. That is the thread for reading this hexagram.

The judgment and the Commentary: a condition in the judgment, two questions at the end

The judgment has three parts:

Yuan heng. Li zhen. If it is not upright there is calamity, and it is not fitting to go anywhere.

The first two, "yuan heng" and "li zhen", are the four words that Qian also has, divided here into two phrases. The last part adds a condition: if it is not upright, there is calamity, and going on is not fitting. The Commentary on the Judgments takes the judgment up like this:

Wuwang: the firm comes from outside and becomes the master within. It moves and is strong; the firm holds the center and is matched; very successful, and upright: such is heaven's decree. "If it is not upright there is calamity, and it is not fitting to go anywhere." Going free of recklessness: where would one go? When heaven's decree gives no help, can one proceed?

"The firm comes from outside and becomes the master within" is read off the figure: the only yang line of the lower trigram, the inner one, is line one, and that trigram is led by it. How it "comes from outside" is explained differently by the traditional theories of how one hexagram turns into another, and here the words are taken literally. "It moves and is strong" is Zhen below moving and Qian above strong. "The firm holds the center and is matched" is line five: a yang line occupying the heart of the upper trigram, with line two below corresponding to it. "Very successful, and upright: such is heaven's decree" sums up "yuan heng, li zhen".

The Commentary ends with two questions: "going free of recklessness: where would one go?", and "when heaven's decree gives no help, can one proceed?"

The Great Image: thunder moves under heaven, the kings respond to the season

The Great Image reads:

Under heaven thunder moves; all things share in Wuwang. The ancient kings accordingly responded to the season with abundance, and nurtured the ten thousand things.

"Under heaven thunder moves" is Zhen beneath Qian, thunder going about under the sky. The phrase translated "share in" is read in several ways; literally it puts the things of the world together with "wuwang", and a common reading is that each thing keeps to its own nature. What follows is the kings' conduct: "respond with abundance" means giving full effort, "to the season" means to what the time asks, and "nurtured the ten thousand things" means they fed and raised everything.

In the hexagram before, Fu, the thunder is still in the ground and the kings shut the passes. In this one the thunder is already moving under the sky, and the kings' act turns from closing to nurturing.

The six statements: what comes after "wuwang"

The word wuwang shows up four times in the six statements, and the Small Images attach it again in other places.

Line one, "wuwang, going brings good fortune", goes forward free of recklessness, with good fortune; the Small Image says "going free of recklessness: the aim is attained". Line two changes the subject: "not plowing yet harvesting, not clearing a new field yet having a ripe one: then it is fitting to have somewhere to go". The first word names a field in its first year after clearing and the second a field worked for three years. There are two ways to divide the sentence: one gives harvest without plowing and a ripe field without clearing, the other gives plowing without aiming at a harvest and clearing without aiming at a ripe field. The Small Image says only "not yet rich".

Line three, "a wuwang calamity: perhaps an ox is tied; the passer-by gains it, the townsman bears the calamity": someone has tied up an ox, a traveler leads it off, and the townspeople suffer for it. The Small Image restates it as "the traveler gets the ox, and it is the townsman's calamity". Line four, "can stay on course: no blame", has the Small Image "it has this from the start". Line five, "a wuwang illness: no medicine, and there is joy": an illness that came with no recklessness, which gives joy without medicine; the Small Image changes "illness" to "medicine": "a wuwang medicine must not be tried". The top line says "wuwang, yet going brings calamity; nothing is favorable", and its Small Image "wuwang action: the calamity of having reached the end".

Neighbors of Wuwang: Daxu, Sheng, Jian, and "no recklessness" in the Xu Gua

Turn Wuwang over and you have Daxu (大畜). Flip each line to its opposite and Sheng (升) results. The nuclear hexagram is Jian (漸), obtained by regrouping lines two to four and three to five; its derivation is in the structure of a hexagram.

The Xu Gua joins Wuwang to the hexagram before it in one short phrase:

once returned, there is no recklessness

Once the return has happened, recklessness is gone. For the next hexagram, Daxu, the Xu Gua says that only with this absence of recklessness can anything be stored up.