Opposition

The thirty-eighth hexagram, Kui ("Opposition" or Estrangement), places Li (Fire) above Dui (Lake). Fire moves upward and the lake seeps downward, two elements drawing apart, the image of divergence and misunderstanding. It follows The Family in the King Wen order, the discord that can follow domestic disorder.

Kui 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: eleventh of 64, apart from its thirty-eighth 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 Opposition run yang, yang, yin, 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 Kan over Li, forming hexagram 63, After Completion (Ji Ji), 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. Opposition's King Wen partner is hexagram 37, The Family (Jia 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, allows that in small matters there is good fortune, for although unity is broken and wills diverge, minor undertakings may still succeed and opposites can be made to complement one another. The Image speaks of the superior person who, amid general fellowship, retains his own individuality. The core theme is opposition and estrangement, together with the possibility that difference need not mean enmity. 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 Kui 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, Opposition (Kui), hexagram 38, is paired with its inversion: The Family (Jia Ren), hexagram 37. 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, 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.