Darkening of the Light

The thirty-sixth hexagram, Ming Yi ("Darkening of the Light"), places Kun (Earth) above Li (Fire). The sun sunk beneath the earth, its light hidden, gives the image of brightness wounded and a dark time in which the wise must conceal their gifts. It follows Progress in the King Wen order, its exact reversal.

Ming Yi stands 24th 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 thirty-sixth 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 Darkening of the Light run yang, yin, yang, 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 Zhen over Kan, forming hexagram 40, Deliverance (Xie), 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. Darkening of the Light's King Wen partner is hexagram 35, Progress (Jin); 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, counsels that in adversity it furthers to be persevering, and specifically to keep ones inner light while veiling it outwardly, enduring a hostile time without provoking it. The Image speaks of the superior person who governs the people by veiling his brightness, tempering clarity with restraint. The core theme is the concealment of ones light and integrity in a dark period. 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 Ming Yi 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.