Small Taming

The ninth hexagram, Xiao Xu ("The Taming Power of the Small"), places Xun (Wind) above Qian (Heaven). Wind moving across the sky can restrain the great creative force only gently and for a time, the image of a small power holding back a large one. It follows Union in the King Wen sequence.

Xiao Xu stands fifth 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, close to the head of that sequence though ninth in the King Wen order used above; it was this 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 Small Taming run yang, yang, yang, 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 Li over Dui, forming hexagram 38, Opposition (Kui), 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. Small Taming's King Wen partner is hexagram 10, Treading (Lu); 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 but notes dense clouds gathering from the west that bring no rain yet, the sign of forces accumulating before they can be released. The Image counsels refining ones outward conduct and cultural graces while the greater work waits. The core theme is gentle, gradual restraint and the patient buildup of small influences. Any line received as a moving line changes to its opposite and yields a second hexagram that shades 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. In the King Wen sequence, Small Taming (Xiao Xu), hexagram 9, is paired with its inversion: Treading (Lu), hexagram 10. 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.