Influence

The thirty-first hexagram, Xian ("Influence" or Wooing), places Dui (Lake) above Gen (Mountain). The joyous lake resting upon the still mountain gives the image of mutual attraction, the young man beneath the young woman, courtship and reciprocal stimulation. It opens the second half of 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, Xian stands 50th of 64, apart from its place opening the second half of 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 Influence run yin, yin, yang, 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 Qian over Xun, forming hexagram 44, Coming to Meet (Gou), 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. Influence's King Wen partner is hexagram 32, Duration (Heng); 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 and rewards perseverance, and finds good fortune in taking a maiden to wife, for genuine influence works through attraction and receptivity rather than force. The Image speaks of the superior person who keeps his mind open and receptive, letting others reach him. The core theme is influence exercised by stimulation and answered by openness, the basis of courtship and of all persuasion. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that refines the counsel.

Tradition assigns the hexagram statement to King Wen of Zhou, the line statements to the Duke of Zhou and the Ten Wings commentary to Confucius; modern scholarship accepts none of the three attributions, treating the core instead as an anonymous Western Zhou compilation later overlaid, from the fourth to second century BCE, by the Ten Wings that supply the Image and the language of the superior person used above. Between them stand two further layers of reading, Wang Bi's third-century philosophical commentary and Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi; the one played down the trigram image-correlations, the other reasserted the text's identity as a divination manual.