Gathering Together

The forty-fifth hexagram, Cui ("Gathering Together" or Massing), places Dui (Lake) above Kun (Earth). The lake gathered upon the earth, its waters collecting, gives the image of people assembling around a leader and a common center. It follows Breakthrough in the King Wen order.

Cui holds a further position in the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary ordering devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi: 58th of 64, apart from its forty-fifth place in the King Wen sequence above. This was the Fu Xi ordering that the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet sent from Beijing in 1701 to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who recognized its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of Gathering Together run yin, yin, yin, yang, yang, 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 Xun over Gen, forming hexagram 53, Development (Jian), 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. Gathering Together's King Wen partner is hexagram 46, Pushing Upward (Sheng); 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, pictures the king approaching his temple to draw the people together in reverence, favors seeking a great person and finds good fortune in great offerings, for gathering a multitude requires a worthy center and a shared devotion. The Image speaks of the superior person who renews his weapons to meet the unforeseen, since large gatherings bring their own risks. The core theme is congregation and assembly around a legitimate focus. 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 Cui 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.