Jin: light over the earth, three audiences

Light over the earth: Li above, Kun below

Jin (晉) is Li above and Kun below. In the Shuo Gua the one word for Li is “clinging”, and it adds that Li is brightness, the trigram in which all things see one another. Kun is “yielding”, and its image is earth. With Li above and Kun below, light rises from the ground.

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Jin and its reversed hexagram Mingyi: reversing turns the whole figure over, so the Li that sits above in Jin sits below in Mingyi.

The judgment and the Commentary: gifts, and three audiences in a day

The judgment of Jin is not a verdict in one phrase; it is a scene.

Lord Kang is granted horses in great number, and is received three times in the course of a day.

The word for “granted” is a variant of “bestow”, and the phrase for “great number” means both many and flourishing. “Received” is a formal reception, so the last clause means a lord has three audiences in one daytime. The Commentary joins the two halves with a “that is why”: because light comes out above the earth, because it yields and clings to the great light, because the soft advances upward, the lord receives gifts and is received three times.

“The soft advances and moves upward” can be checked on the figure. The upper trigram Li is yang, yin, yang, so its middle line, a yin line, sits exactly in the fifth place. A soft line has risen into the fifth place, which is what the Commentary calls the soft moving upward.

The Great Image: make your own virtue shine

The Great Image (大象) of Jin turns the judgment’s gift in another direction.

Light comes out above the earth: Jin. The noble person makes his own bright virtue shine.

“His own” is the key word, and “shine” means to make bright; “bright virtue” is virtue that gives light. What the noble person does is to light up his own virtue.

The lord in the judgment is granted things and received, while the Image speaks of “his own”: not waiting for anyone to shine on him, but giving light himself. Read side by side, Jin writes about two kinds of light. The Great Image of the next hexagram, Mingyi, shows a different way of using light, and the next article takes it up.

Six lines: three “advancing”s, three flavors

Three of the six statements begin with “advancing”, and the word after it is different each time.

Line 1, “advancing, then thwarted”, goes forward and is set back; “staying on course brings good fortune”, and a further clause says “not trusted; be at ease and there is no blame”. The Small Image says he walks alone and rightly, and that he has not yet received a commission. Line 2, “advancing, then sorrowful”, gets the same “good fortune” and then “he receives this great blessing from his royal grandmother”, where tradition usually reads the royal mother as a grandmother. The Small Image gives the reason: he is central and upright, a yin line in the second place, which suits yin, at the middle of the lower trigram.

Line 3, “all consent”, has everyone’s agreement, and the Small Image says their will goes upward: it is the top line of Kun, and above it is Li. Line 4, “advancing like a great rat”, is dangerous; the rat in question is a large rodent (another text has a variant for its name), and the Small Image says the place is not fitting. Line 4 is a yang line in the fourth place, a yin place, right beside the fifth place, and yet it is the one that reads “staying on course is dangerous”.

Line 5 says “regret vanishes; do not fret over loss and gain” (some texts have a variant for “loss”), and “to go on is fortunate”, which the Small Image calls cause for celebration. Line 6, “advancing to the horns”, goes forward to the very tip, fitting only for attacking a town. It reads “danger, then good fortune, no blame”, and then “staying on this course brings difficulty”. The Small Image says the Way is not yet bright.

Mingyi, Xu (Waiting) and Jian: neighbors of Jin and the hexagrams on either side

Turn Jin upside down and you get Mingyi (明夷), so Mingyi is its reversed hexagram (综卦), shown above. The inverse hexagram (错卦) is Xu (需) and the nuclear hexagram (互卦) is Jian (蹇): lines 2 to 4 of Jin are yin, yin, yang (Gen) and lines 3 to 5 are yin, yang, yin (Kan), which gives Gen below and Kan above.

The Xu Gua (the Sequence) places Jin after Dazhuang: strength cannot last to the end, so one has to move on, and that is Jin. After Jin comes Mingyi, for the reason that anyone who advances will be hurt along the way, and the word in Mingyi’s name means a wound. Seen like that, Jin sits between two hexagrams: the one before speaks of the limits of strength, the one after of light being pressed down.