Huan: what is scattered, and where it gathers

Wind over water: Xun above, Kan below

Huan (渙) is Xun (wind) above and Kan (water) below. In the Shuo Gua, Xun is “entering”, pictured as wood and wind; Kan is “sinking in”, pictured as water. From the bottom the lines run yin, yang, yin and then yin, yang, yang. Kan has a single yang line held between two yin ones, while Xun puts one yin line beneath two yang ones.

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Huan and its reversed hexagram Jie: the yin line at the bottom of Huan ends up at the top of Jie.

The judgment and the Commentary: the king at the temple, crossing the great river

The judgment of Huan reads: success; the king comes to the temple; fitting to cross the great river; fitting to stay on course. Two of the four sentences name a place, the temple and the river, and the Commentary on the Judgments takes them in turn.

Huan, success: the firm comes and is not exhausted, and the yielding gets its place on the outside and joins those above. “The king comes to the temple”: the king is then at the center. “Fitting to cross the great river”: riding on wood brings merit.

The figure bears each of these out. “The firm comes and is not exhausted” is traditionally read of line 2: a yang line arrives in the middle of the lower trigram, Kan, and is not trapped. “The yielding gets its place on the outside and joins those above”: line 4 is yin and stands in the fourth place, a yin place, in the upper trigram, the “outside”, with line 5 directly above it, which is the “joining”. “The king comes to the temple; the king is then at the center” goes on from there. The last sentence is “riding on wood”: Xun above is wood, Kan below is water, and wood on water is what carries one across.

The Great Image: wind over water, offerings and temples

The Great Image of Huan reads:

Wind moving over water: Huan. The former kings made offerings to the Lord and set up temples.

Wind moves over the surface of water. Tradition usually reads it this way: the ripples are driven outward in every direction, and from this the former kings took their conduct, to make offerings to the Lord and to establish temples, gathering scattered hearts around a shared rite.

Huan is scattering, and the Great Image ends in gathering. It is not the first time the hexagram lands there: the second sentence of the judgment is already “the king comes to the temple”, and the Image closes on “set up temples”, so judgment and Image both land at the temple. This Image uses the opening “the former kings”, not “the noble person”.

Six lines: what comes after “scatter”

In the six statements, the thing that follows “scatter” is different on almost every line.

Line 1 is at the bottom and its statement has no “scatter” in it; it begins “to rescue, he uses a strong horse”, and the Small Image (小象) says he goes along. Line 2 reads “scattering, he runs to his stool”. The word for stool is traditionally read as a low table, something to lean on, so as things scatter he runs to what he can lean on, and the Small Image says he gets his wish. Line 3, “scatters his own self: no regret”, takes even his own body into the scattering, and the Small Image puts his aim outside. Line 4, “scatters his band: great good fortune”, goes on: “scattering, there is a hill; not what ordinary minds think of”, which tradition reads as scattering that ends in a mound heaped up; the Small Image calls bright and great.

Line 5 reads “scattering like sweat, his great proclamations; scattering the king’s dwelling: no blame”. Tradition usually takes sweat as a figure for orders that cannot be recalled once out. The Small Image says his position is right: line 5 stands in the fifth place. Line 6 reads “scatters his blood; goes away, far off, and leaves: no blame”, and the Small Image says he keeps far from harm.

Set the objects side by side: stool, self, band; proclamations and the dwelling belong to the one in the high place; at the end is blood, sent far off. The results are good fortune, regret vanishes, no regret, great good fortune, no blame, no blame, and none of the six reads misfortune.

Jie, Feng and Yi: neighbors of Huan and its place after Dui

Huan’s reversed hexagram is Jie, already in the figure above. Its inverse is Feng, which flips each line of Huan to the opposite polarity. Its nuclear hexagram, Yi (頤), comes from the middle lines: Zhen (yang, yin, yin) below and Gen (yin, yin, yang) above.

The Xu Gua puts Huan after Dui:

After delight comes scattering, so what follows is Huan; Huan means separating.

Delight first, then scattering. The next hexagram is Jie, and the Xu Gua’s reason is that separation cannot go on to the end, so limits must come. In the Xu Gua, Feng (豐) means “great”, and Huan is scattering, so the inverse pair is one of greatness and one of dispersal.