Splitting Apart

The twenty-third hexagram, Bo ("Splitting Apart"), places Gen (Mountain) above Kun (Earth). A single firm line remains at the top while yielding lines press up from below, the image of a mountain crumbling and resting on the earth, decay reaching its height. It follows Grace in the King Wen sequence.

Bo 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: 63rd of 64, near the very end of that sequence though twenty-third in the King Wen order 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 Splitting Apart run yin, yin, yin, yin, 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 Kun over Kun, forming hexagram 2, The Receptive (Kun), 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. Splitting Apart's King Wen partner is hexagram 24, Return (Fu); 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 a warning: it does not favor setting out anywhere, for this is a time when inferior forces are undermining the good and one can only wait and hold still. The Image speaks of those above securing their position by generosity toward those below, since the house stands only on a firm base. The core theme is deterioration and the wisdom of patience when circumstances are adverse. 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 Bo 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, Splitting Apart (Bo), hexagram 23, is paired with its inversion: Return (Fu), hexagram 24. 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.