Heng: lasting is not standing still

Thunder over wind: two restless things

Heng (恒) is Zhen (thunder) above and Xun (wind) below. The Shuo Gua gives each trigram a word: Zhen is moving, Xun is entering. It also says that nothing sets things in motion faster than thunder and nothing bends them faster than wind, and then adds a line of its own: thunder and wind do not oppose each other.

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Heng and its reversed hexagram Xian: reversing turns the whole figure upside down, so Zhen turns into Gen and Xun into Dui, which gives Xian.

Choosing two of the most restless trigrams as the image of a word that means “lasting” is the first thing to notice. In this text Heng is not stillness; it is staying together between two kinds of ceaseless motion.

The Commentary on the Judgments (彖传) counts three features of the figure: “the firm above and the soft below”, “entering and moving”, and “firm and soft all answer”. The third can be checked directly: lines 1 and 4, 2 and 5, and 3 and 6 are each a yin and a yang.

The judgment and the Commentary: lasting by changing

The judgment of Heng reads: success, no blame; fitting to stay on the right course; fitting to have somewhere to go. The last clause is a small surprise, since a hexagram called “lasting” says outright that going somewhere is favorable. The Commentary first explains the name in three words, “Heng means lasting”, and then answers with a series of examples of how lasting is done.

The sun and moon keep to heaven and so can shine for long. The four seasons change and so can complete things for long. The sage stays long in his way, and so the world is transformed and completed.

The seasons never stop changing, yet they are said to “complete things for long”, because when one season ends the next picks up. That is the very sense in which the Commentary glosses the clause about having somewhere to go: when an end is reached, a beginning follows. Read this way, lasting in the text is continuation, not staying where you are.

The Commentary closes with a method: look at what a thing keeps up, and the character of heaven, earth and all things can be seen.

The Great Image: what stands is the direction

The Great Image (大象) of Heng is a single sentence.

Thunder and wind: Heng. The noble person stands and does not change direction.

To stand is to hold firm. The word translated “change” is the same one that gives the Yi in Zhouyi, and the word for “direction” can also mean a place or a way of doing things. Thunder and wind never stand still, yet the noble person is told to stand; and what must not change is neither motion nor stillness, but the direction.

Swap thunder and wind top for bottom and you get Yi (益), wind over thunder, which is also the inverse hexagram (错卦) of Heng. The Great Image of Yi falls the other way: when you see something good, move toward it, and when you have erred, correct it.

Read side by side, each has its own object: Yi’s moving and mending answer to particular goods and faults, while Heng’s refusal to change answers to a direction.

Six lines: mostly lasting gone wrong

Among the six line statements of Heng, only line 2, “regret vanishes”, and line 5, “constant in virtue”, speak of lasting working. The other four describe lasting sought in the wrong way.

Line 1 is at the bottom. The verb in “digging deep for constancy” is to dredge or dig, and the Small Image explains the ominous result: at the very start it asks for depth. Line 2 has only two words, “regret vanishes”, and the Small Image gives the reason: it can last by staying in the middle, at the center of the lower trigram.

Line 3, “not constant in his virtue”, is judged by the Small Image as having no place that can hold him. Line 4, “no game in the field”, is explained as staying long in a place that is not one’s own. Line 4 is a yang line sitting in the fourth place, a yin place, which fits that comment.

Line 5, “constant in his virtue”, is the one clearly positive statement about lasting, yet it goes on to sort fortune by role: good for a woman, ominous for a man. The Small Image explains that a woman who follows one course to its end is fortunate, while a man, who is the one to decide what is right, is in trouble if he simply follows. The same “following one” is judged differently depending on who does it.

Line 6, “stirring up constancy”, is written with the character for thunder in this text, with a variant reading that uses the character for shaking; the Small Image has the latter. The line sits at the very top of the upper trigram Zhen, and the Small Image comments that it achieves nothing great.

Xian, Yi and Guai: neighbors of Heng and its place in the sequence

Turn Heng upside down and you get Xian (咸), so Xian is the reversed hexagram (综卦) of Heng (see the figure above), and the two form a pair. The Xu Gua says that a marriage cannot do without lasting, and the next hexagram is therefore Heng. The Za Gua gives the pair one word each: Xian is quick, Heng is lasting.

The inverse hexagram is Yi, mentioned above. The nuclear hexagram (互卦) is Guai (夬): lines 2 to 4 of Heng are three yang lines (Qian), and lines 3 to 5 are yang, yang, yin (Dui), so they stack as Qian below and Dui above.

After Heng the Xu Gua moves on to Dun, giving as its reason that a thing cannot stay forever in the same place, and Dun means retreat. The step from lasting to retreating is exactly where the next article begins: Dun.