Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Keeping Still, and a Hexagram About a Body

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Keeping Still, and a Hexagram About a Body

Hexagram 52 is the doubled mountain trigram, and its line texts do something no other hexagram does: they proceed up a human body.

The first line concerns the toes. The second the calves. The third the hips or the loins, with the spine held rigid. The fourth the trunk. The fifth the jaws, with the counsel that words have order. The sixth is noble-hearted keeping still, and good fortune.

The traditional reading, and Wilhelm's, takes this as a progressive discipline of the self, and the Ten Wings connect it to a stillness so complete that a person walks into their own courtyard and does not see the people in it. That is the passage on which the hexagram's reputation as the meditation hexagram rests, and it has been used that way for centuries within the Chinese tradition.

Translators working from the older stratum are more cautious. Line texts moving up the body are also the pattern of an omen series about pain, injury or a ritual involving the body, and the third line's rigid spine with danger and a smothered heart reads more like a physical complaint than a contemplative state. Rutt's version keeps the anatomy plain.

Both readings are defensible. What should be avoided is presenting the meditation interpretation as the text's original meaning, when it is a later and highly productive development of it.

It is also worth resisting the reverse error. The fact that a reading is later does not make it worse, and the contemplative tradition built on this hexagram is one of the more substantial things the I Ching has produced. The requirement is only to say which layer a claim belongs to.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.