Great Possession

The fourteenth hexagram, Da You ("Possession in Great Measure"), places Li (Fire) above Qian (Heaven). Fire high in the heavens, like the sun at its zenith illuminating all below, gives the image of great and clear possession. It follows Fellowship in the King Wen sequence.

Da You stands third 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, near the very head of that sequence though fourteenth in the King Wen order used above; this was the arrangement Joachim Bouvet, a Jesuit in Beijing, sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1701, letting Leibniz read the broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of Great Possession run yang, yang, yang, yang, yin, yang. 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 Qian, forming hexagram 43, Breakthrough (Guai), 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. Great Possession's King Wen partner is hexagram 13, Fellowship (Tong Ren); 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, is brief and strong: supreme success. The Image counsels curbing evil and furthering good, obeying the benevolent will of heaven, so that great wealth is held with clarity and modesty rather than pride. The core theme is abundance possessed rightly, strength joined to clear-sighted humility. Any line received as a moving line transforms into its opposite, producing a second hexagram that modifies the reading.

Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi, the Song Neo-Confucian synthesis most later readers encountered Da You 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, Great Possession (Da You), hexagram 14, is paired with its inversion: Fellowship (Tong Ren), hexagram 13. 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 that shaped most twentieth-century readers' sense of the book, 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.