Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
I Ching Hexagrams

Waiting

SHOO
Xu

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Origin 1000 BCE to 350 BCE

King Wen hexagram 5, Waiting or Nourishment (Xu), places Water above Heaven: the rain clouds gathered in the sky, not yet fallen, an image of waiting for the right moment while nourishing oneself in confidence. It describes the strength that knows how to wait, holding back before danger until conditions ripen, without anxiety or premature action. Its Judgment says that if one is sincere one has light and success, that perseverance brings good fortune, and that it furthers one to cross the great water when the time comes: waiting founded on inner certainty is not idle but a form of readiness. Its Image counsels the superior person to eat, drink, and be joyous, keeping up their strength and good cheer while they wait. As a reading it teaches patient, confident waiting, attending to one own nourishment and composure rather than forcing matters, trusting that the moment to act will surely arrive.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1000 BCE to 350 BCE 1Tradition: Zhou Yi, the Western Zhou divination core
Origin Period
1924 to 1950 2Tradition: Wilhelm-Baynes I Ching (1950)
Origin Period
400 BCE to 100 BCE 3Tradition: Zhou Yi and the Ten Wings
Origin Period
This hexagram's dating spans three distinct historical layers: the divinatory judgment text of the Zhouyi core, composed in the early Western Zhou around 1000 BCE and recovered in the Mawangdui silk manuscripts; the Ten Wings commentary tradition that gave the hexagrams their later philosophical reading, compiled across the Warring States and Han periods by around 400 BCE; and the English title used here, coined in Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German translation and carried into English by Cary Baynes. 2
Attributed Author / Compiler
By tradition: the hexagram statements to King Wen of Zhou, the line statements to the Duke of Zhou, and the Ten Wings to Confucius. 3Tradition: Zhou Yi and the Ten Wings
Attributed Author / Compiler
No named author. The core is a Western Zhou compilation with no compiler on record, and the ascription of the Ten Wings to Confucius was already being questioned inside the Chinese tradition by the eleventh century and is defended by no current scholarship. 3
Language
Classical Chinese 4
Identity
King Wen Number
1
Native Name
Xu 1
Attributions
Trigram Pairing
Water over Heaven 1
Order
Position in the Sequence
2Tradition: King Wen sequence, the received order
Position in the Sequence
2Tradition: Xiantian (Earlier Heaven) arrangement of Shao Yong
Learn More
Waiting Is Not Passivity

Hexagram 5 is conventionally named Waiting, and both the name and its usual gloss are worth examining, because the underlying word carries more than English "waiting" does.

The line texts place the waiting somewhere specific each time: waiting in the meadow, in the sand, in the mud, in blood, with wine and food, and finally in a pit, where three uninvited guests arrive. That sequence moves steadily closer to danger. This is not a hexagram about patience in the abstract; it describes a person waiting while something approaches, and the ground under them getting worse.

The judgement in Wilhelm speaks of sincerity, of light and success, and of it furthering to cross the great water, one of the book's recurring formulas, usually taken as a signal that a major undertaking is favoured. That phrase appears throughout the text and is one of the clearest indications of its practical origins; crossing a large river was a real logistical decision with real risk, and a diviner was being asked about it.

Some translators have argued that the hexagram's name relates to a sacrificial or rain-making rite rather than to waiting as such. That reading is not the standard one, and it is offered here as a live minority position rather than as a correction. What can be said is that the received name arrives through a long commentarial tradition and that the line texts do not obviously require it.

The distinction matters for practice. Waiting understood as patience counsels doing nothing. Waiting understood as a rite counsels doing something specific and then stopping, which is a different instruction and, in most spreads, a more useful one.

Nourishment While Nothing Happens

The most useful thing about hexagram 5 in practice is the fifth line, which counsels waiting with wine and food, and perseverance bringing good fortune.

That line establishes the hexagram's characteristic advice, which is not endurance but provisioning. The counsel is that during a delay one should eat well, keep company, and maintain ordinary life rather than suspending it until the outcome arrives. A great many querents who draw this figure have put their lives on hold, and the text explicitly tells them not to.

The reading is otherwise straightforward: a situation whose resolution is not in the querent's hands and will not be accelerated by effort. The distinction from other delay hexagrams is that here the outcome is not in doubt, only its timing. What is being waited for is coming.

The top line complicates that. One falls into the pit, three uninvited guests arrive, and honouring them brings good fortune in the end. Nobody agrees on what the three guests are. Wilhelm reads them as unexpected help arriving in unwelcome form; other translations leave the image unexplained, which is probably more honest. It is a good example of a passage where the received interpretation is a commentator's guess repeated until it hardened.

The hexagram inverts to Conflict, and the pair sets waiting against contention, two responses to the same obstruction, placed side by side in the sequence so that each is read against the other. Reading either without its partner loses the comparison the compiler evidently intended.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Corresponds To

Channel of Rhythm bridges Hexagram 5, Waiting, and Hexagram 15, Modesty, per its own iching-correspondence fact; this edge names the 5 side.

Source The Human Design SystemRa Uru Hu (Alan Robert Krakower)

Gene Key 5, From Impatience to Timelessness, corresponds to Hexagram 5, Waiting, per its own iching-correspondence fact.

Human Design Gate 5, Natural Rhythms, corresponds to Hexagram 5, Waiting, per its own iching-correspondence fact.

Source The Human Design SystemRa Uru Hu (Alan Robert Krakower)

Disciplines That Use This

I Ching, Disciplines

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Originates in Language

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Reached by Changing Lines

Sources
1. I Ching: The Classic of Changes, translated with an introduction and commentary, the first English translation of the newly discovered second-century BC Mawangdui texts
Edward L. Shaughnessy (trans.), Ballantine Books, 1996On the dating and composition of the Zhou Yi core
2. Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in China
Richard J. Smith, University of Virginia Press, 2008On Shao Yong's xiantian ordering of the sixty-four hexagramsView the Source
3. The Five "Confucian" Classics
Michael Nylan, Yale University Press, 2001On the authorship question and the critique of the traditional ascriptionsView the Source
4. Zhouyi: The Book of Changes
Richard Rutt (trans.), Curzon Press, 1996On the name of the fifth hexagram and its possible ritual senseView the Source
The I Ching, or Book of Changes
Richard Wilhelm (trans.); Cary F. Baynes (English trans.), Princeton University Press, 1980Hexagram 5, the Judgement and line textsView the Source

Take a Related Quiz

Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.