Guai: proclaim first, then decide

A lake above heaven: five yang lines, one yin

The lower trigram of Guai (夬) is Qian (heaven) and the upper is Dui (lake). In the Shuo Gua Qian is “strength” and Dui is “pleasing”. Counting upward, the first five lines are all yang and only the sixth is yin. The Commentary gives the shape a name, “the soft riding on five firm lines”: one soft line sitting on five firm ones.

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Guai and its reversed hexagram Gou: turned upside down, the single yin line at the top of Guai lands at the bottom of Gou.

The judgment and the Commentary: speak first, arms not first

The judgment of Guai is a run of acts: proclaim it in the king’s court; call out sincerely, with danger; announce it from your own town; it is not fitting to take up arms; it is fitting to have somewhere to go.

Guai means deciding: the firm decides the soft. Strong and pleased, deciding and harmonious: “proclaim it in the king’s court” means the soft rides upon five firm lines. “Call out sincerely, with danger” means the peril is thereby made bright. “Announce it from your own town; not fitting to take up arms” means that what is held up is then exhausted. “Fitting to have somewhere to go” means the firm grows and reaches its end.

The judgment never says what the decision rests on. It lists several things that must be said aloud first, and only then rules out arms. The Commentary starts from the qualities of the trigrams: Qian below is “strong” and Dui above is “pleased”, so “strong and pleased”; the deciding is at the same time harmonious, so “deciding and harmonious”.

“Call out sincerely, with danger; the peril is thereby made bright”: calling out with sincerity, there is danger, and the Commentary says this makes the danger bright, open and aboveboard. “What is held up is then exhausted”: if one takes up arms, what one had upheld comes to its end. The last sentence, “the firm grows and reaches its end”, can be matched against the figure: the yang lines are unbroken from the first place through the fifth, and only the topmost place is still yin, so the growth has run its course.

The Great Image: a lake above heaven; bestow, and shun hoarding

The Great Image (大象) of Guai reads:

A lake above heaven: Guai. The noble person bestows emoluments on those below, and to sit on virtue is shunned.

“A lake above heaven”: the lake lies higher than heaven, so the water has gathered at the highest place. The word for deciding is written with the water radical and literally means water breaking through a bank, and a lake lifted over heaven can be set beside that sense. The noble person’s conduct is half doing, half avoiding: bestow downward, and shun sitting on virtue.

“Bestows emoluments on those below” is giving one’s pay to those lower down. In “to sit on virtue is shunned”, to sit on is to occupy and store up: keeping virtue piled up on oneself is what is shunned. Tradition usually reads it this way: storing up kindness and not passing it down is what is avoided.

Six lines: toes, cheekbone, buttocks, two “resolves”, one “no call”

Of the six statements of Guai, three name a part of the body: a toe, a cheekbone, a buttock.

Line 1 says “strong in the front toes”: the front toes are strong and he pushes ahead, “going without being able to win is a fault”, and the Small Image says “going without winning is a fault”. Line 3 says “strong in the cheekbones: ill fortune”; the character used (頄) is usually read as the cheekbone. Line 4 says “no skin on the buttocks, his walk faltering”: bare of skin, he walks haltingly. “If he leads a sheep, regret vanishes”; “he hears words but does not believe them”. The Small Image gives two comments: the place is not proper, and his hearing is not clear.

“Resolve and resolve” appears in two lines, both in yang places. In line 3: “the noble person resolves and resolves; walking alone he meets rain and is wet through and angry: no blame”. He decides, and decides again, walks alone, is caught in rain, soaked and cross, yet there is no blame, and the Small Image says “in the end no blame”. In line 5: “the wild herb, resolved and resolved; walking the middle, no blame”. Tradition usually reads the herb as a kind of weed. The Small Image’s verdict is “the middle is not yet bright”: in the middle, but not yet bright.

“Call” occurs three times. In the judgment, “call out sincerely” is the sincere call. In line 2, “an alarm cry; weapons at nightfall; do not be anxious”, the Small Image grants him the middle way. In line 6, “no call: in the end, ill fortune”, the Small Image says “in the end it cannot last”. The judgment asks for things to be said aloud first, and the topmost statement is the one where nothing is said.

Bo, Gou and Qian: neighbors of Guai

Guai has five yang lines and one yin line, the yin at the top. Its inverse hexagram Bo (剥) is exactly the opposite: five yin lines and one yang, the yang at the top. Turn Guai upside down and the yin line drops from the top to the bottom, which is Gou (姤), so Gou is the reversed hexagram (综卦) of Guai (see the figure above). The nuclear hexagram (互卦) is Qian: the four middle lines of Guai are all yang, and whether you take lines 2 to 4 or lines 3 to 5 the result is Qian, with Qian on both sides.

The Xu Gua writes Guai after Yi and Gou after Guai: when increase does not stop there must be a break, and after the break there must be an encounter.