Inner Truth

The sixty-first hexagram, Zhong Fu ("Inner Truth"), places Xun (Wind) above Dui (Lake). Wind moving over the lake and stirring its surface gives the image of an influence reaching to the depths, with two open lines at the center suggesting a heart free of prejudice, open and sincere. It follows Limitation in the King Wen order.

Zhong Fu stands 13th 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 sixty-first place, near the very end of 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 Inner Truth run yang, yang, yin, yin, yang, 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 Gen over Zhen, forming hexagram 27, Nourishment (Yi), 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. Inner Truth's King Wen partner is hexagram 62, Small Preponderance (Xiao Guo); 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, holds that inner truth reaches even to pigs and fishes, the least responsive of creatures, and so brings good fortune; it favors crossing the great water and rewards perseverance, for sincerity at the center wins even the difficult. The Image speaks of the superior person who deliberates criminal cases and delays executions, tempering judgment with compassion. The core theme is inner sincerity and confidence that, being genuine, moves others. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that shades the reading.

Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi, the Song Neo-Confucian synthesis most later readers encountered Zhong Fu 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, Inner Truth (Zhong Fu), hexagram 61, cannot be paired by inversion, since turning it upside down reproduces the identical figure; instead it is paired by opposition, every line reversed, with Small Preponderance (Xiao Guo), hexagram 62. James Legge's more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads such passages closer to a historical record than the mystical cast Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German version, carried into English by Cary Baynes in 1950, gave most twentieth-century readers.