Xun is one of the eight trigrams (bagua) of the Yijing. It is composed of a single broken yin line beneath two yang lines, and its attribute is Wind, and also Wood, the Gentle, associated with penetration, gradual influence, and the pliant force that reaches everywhere as wind slips through every gap. In the family symbolism it is the Eldest Daughter, and its polarity is yin. Its associated element is Wood, and in the Later Heaven arrangement of the bagua its direction is southeast. Each of the eight trigrams combines with another to form the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yijing. These are the conventions of the Chinese cosmological and divinatory tradition, in which Xun, gentle and penetrating, is the complement of the Arousing thunder of Zhen.
In the Earlier Heaven or Fu Xi arrangement, an idealised and static ordering of the eight trigrams older than the Later Heaven sequence used for compass direction above, Xun stands in the southwest rather than the southeast. The Fu Xi ordering has one further afterlife outside Chinese cosmology: in 1701 the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet sent Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, from Beijing, a diagram of exactly this arrangement of the sixty-four hexagrams, and Leibniz, already at work on binary arithmetic, saw that broken and unbroken lines mapped onto his 0 and 1; he published the correspondence in Paris in 1703.
Sources Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in ChinaRichard J. Smith with The I Ching, or Book of ChangesRichard Wilhelm (trans.); Cary F. Baynes (English trans.), The Five "Confucian" ClassicsMichael Nylan