Abundance

The fifty-fifth hexagram, Feng ("Abundance" or Fullness), places Zhen (Thunder) above Li (Fire). Thunder and lightning arriving together, both movement and brightness at their height, gives the image of a moment of greatest abundance. It follows The Marrying Maiden in the King Wen sequence.

Feng stands 20th of 64 in the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary ordering devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and ascribed to Fu Xi, distinct from its fifty-fifth place in the King Wen sequence traced above. This was the arrangement Joachim Bouvet, a Jesuit in Beijing, sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1701, letting Leibniz read its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of Abundance run yang, yin, yang, yang, yin, yin. A later interpretive layer absent from the original Zhou Yi, the nuclear hexagram (hu gua), treats lines two through four as a lower trigram and lines three through five as an upper one; here they combine as Dui over Xun, forming hexagram 28, Great Preponderance (Da Guo), a hidden figure first associated with the Han-dynasty scholar Jing Fang, whose Yijing commentary of the first century BCE is credited with the earliest appearance of nuclear trigrams. Abundance's King Wen partner is hexagram 56, The Wanderer (Lu); most of the sixty-four pair this way, related by turning the whole figure upside down, while the eight hexagrams built from a single doubled trigram pair instead by inverting every line. Mawangdui (1973) orders hexagrams by trigram, not King Wen; names here follow Wilhelm and Baynes, 1950, not Legge, 1882.

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises success, likens the moment to a king who attains abundance, and counsels one not to be sad but to be like the sun at midday, enjoying the fullness while aware that noon must give way to afternoon. The Image speaks of the superior person who decides lawsuits and carries out punishments, using clarity and movement while the light is strong. The core theme is abundance at its peak, to be enjoyed with awareness that culmination cannot last. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that shades the reading.

The Judgment and Image paraphrased above draw on two of the Ten Wings, commentarial texts appended to the Yijing and traditionally credited to Confucius, though the attribution was already doubted within the Chinese tradition by the eleventh century and modern scholarship instead dates their composition to roughly the fourth to second century BCE, well after the Zhou Yi core itself. Wang Bi's third-century commentary read passages like this one from Feng philosophically, playing down the trigram image-correlations earlier commentators relied on, while Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi pushed back the other way, insisting the book remain readable as the divination manual it began as.