Gen

Gen is one of the eight trigrams (bagua) of the Yijing. It is composed of a single yang line above two broken yin lines, and its attribute is the Mountain, Keeping Still, associated with stillness, stopping, meditation, and the immovable steadiness of the mountain. In the family symbolism it is the Youngest Son, and its polarity is yang. Its associated element is Earth, and in the Later Heaven arrangement of the bagua its direction is northeast. 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 Gen, the mountain at rest, expresses the moment of stopping and the inward stillness that the Book of Changes treats as its own kind of action.

The family member and attribute scheme used throughout the eight trigrams, Gen among them, comes from the Shuogua zhuan, the Explanation of the Trigrams, one of the Ten Wings appended to the Yijing; later tradition credited the text to Confucius, an attribution modern scholarship does not accept, and manuscript evidence places its compilation toward the end of the Warring States period or the start of the Han. In the Earlier Heaven or Fu Xi arrangement, an older and more static ordering than the Later Heaven sequence used for compass direction above, Gen stands in the northwest rather than the northeast; the shift is general across the two schemes, since the Fu Xi ordering pairs each trigram with its direct opposite around the circle, Gen facing Dui in the southeast, a symmetry the King Wen or Later Heaven sequence does not preserve.

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

Gen sits in the northwest in the Earlier Heaven arrangement attributed to Fuxi, opposite Dui in the southeast. In the Later Heaven arrangement attributed to King Wen it moves to the northeast, the quarter the applied traditions associate with it.

The northeast in the Later Heaven order is the hinge between the end of one cycle and the start of the next, the turn from deep winter toward spring, and the Shuogua describes Gen as the place where the cycle both finishes and begins again. A trigram whose attribute is the mountain and whose name is glossed as Keeping Still belongs at that pause. The reading is not that nothing is happening there but that the stopping is what makes the next beginning possible.

In the Later Heaven order Gen belongs to the phase Earth, which it shares with Kun, and the two hold the diagonal corners of the diagram. From the Shuogua Gen takes the dog among animals, the watcher that stays at the threshold, and the hand among the parts of the body, the part that grasps and therefore also holds still. In the family scheme Gen is the youngest son, its single yang line in the top place.

Gen and Zhen are inversions of each other, one yang line at the top against one yang line at the bottom, and the tradition reads them as stopping and starting respectively.

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