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Clinging, Netting, or a Bird

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Clinging, Netting, or a Bird

Hexagram 30 is the doubled fire trigram, and its name Li is among the most contested single words in the book.

Wilhelm gives The Clinging, and builds the hexagram around fire's dependence on what it burns, brightness that has no substance of its own and must attach itself to something. That reading is coherent, influential, and the reason the hexagram arrives in English as a lesson about dependence and illumination.

The character has other established senses. It can mean to be caught in a net, and it is also used for a bird, in some readings an oriole. Translators working from the Bronze Age stratum have taken the hexagram as being about netting or snaring, which sits interestingly beside hexagram 29's pits: two consecutive figures about traps. Legge notes the difficulty. Rutt's 1996 version takes the concrete route.

The line texts do not decisively settle it. They include footprints running crisscross, the setting sun, an old person beating a pot and singing, a fire that flames up and dies and is thrown away, tears and lamentation, and a king marching out and taking prisoners. That is a mixture of the domestic, the martial and the elegiac, and it can be made to support several readings.

What is not in doubt is the figure's structural role. As the doubled fire trigram it closes the first half of the King Wen sequence, opposite the doubled water of hexagram 29, and the pairing of fire and water at that hinge is clearly deliberate. Whatever the King Wen sequence is, whoever assembled it put the two doubled elemental figures at its midpoint on purpose.

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