Approach

The nineteenth hexagram, Lin ("Approach"), places Kun (Earth) above Dui (Lake). The earth rising above the lake, bending toward its depths, gives the image of the great drawing near to the small, a benevolent approach and growing influence. It stands nineteenth in the King Wen sequence.

In the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary order devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi, Lin stands 16th of 64, apart from its nineteenth position in the King Wen sequence traced above; it was this arrangement the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet sent from Beijing in 1701 to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who read its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of Approach run yang, yang, yin, yin, 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 Kun over Zhen, forming hexagram 24, Return (Fu), 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. Approach's King Wen partner is hexagram 20, Contemplation (Guan); 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 supreme success through perseverance but adds a warning: when the eighth month comes there will be misfortune, for what is now waxing must in time wane. The Image speaks of the superior person who is inexhaustible in the will to teach and boundless in tolerance toward the people. The core theme is ascendancy and approach, welcomed but held with awareness of its season. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that adjusts the reading.

Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi, the Song Neo-Confucian synthesis most later readers encountered Lin through, treated the Judgment above first as a divination formula and only secondarily as moral instruction, a corrective to Cheng Yi's more purely philosophical Yichuan Yizhuan. The Mawangdui silk manuscript, recovered from a sealed Han tomb in 1973 and dated before 168 BCE, preserves closely related material in a wholly different sequence, organized by paired trigrams rather than the King Wen order, evidence that the hexagram texts still circulated in more than one arrangement this late. In the King Wen sequence, Approach (Lin), hexagram 19, is paired with its inversion: Contemplation (Guan), hexagram 20. Translations of the Judgment above vary by tradition: Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German rendering, carried into English by Cary Baynes for the 1950 Bollingen edition, gives the text a mystical, aphoristic cast, while James Legge's earlier and more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads the same lines closer to a historical record.