Someone sends me a screenshot of a casting. Hexagram fifteen, Modesty, and underneath it the question of whether that is a good one.
My reply is usually a question back. Which line did you get.
That stalls things for a while. They know they have a hexagram. What they do not know is that they also have a position inside it, and there are three hundred and eighty-four of those. Asking whether a hexagram is good is like asking whether Sydney is a good city to live in, which depends on the suburb.
Six lines, counted upward
A hexagram grows from the bottom. The lowest line is the initial line, then second, third, fourth, fifth, and the sixth is called top instead. My guess about why the ends get words rather than numbers is that initial and top mark sequence, the four between them rank.
Yang lines are called nine, yin lines six, so the bottom line is initial nine when yang and initial six when yin. The numbers come from the yarrow procedure, which yields six, seven, eight or nine: old yin six, young yang seven, young yin eight, old yang nine. Only the old ones change, and the naming took those. Seven and eight never appear.
The lower three lines make the lower trigram, also called inner, and the upper three make the upper, or outer. Eight trigrams doubled against each other give sixty-four.
Names need a note here, because English readers meet these hexagrams under English titles. Number fifteen is 謙 and number one is 乾, and in pinyin both come out qian, separated only by tone. Most readers know them as Modesty and The Creative, Wilhelm’s German choices carried into English by Cary Baynes. When I quote one of these in English I put the character next to it.
Correct position
First, third and fifth are odd places and count as yang, while second, fourth and top are even and count as yin. A yang in a yang place, or a yin in a yin place, sits correctly.
What that measures is propriety, not fortune. The text is full of correctly placed lines carrying grim statements, and the reverse turns up just as often.
The centre
The second line sits at the middle of the lower trigram, the fifth at the middle of the upper. Those two are central.
Central and correct coincide at a yin in the second place and a yang in the fifth, always the two most highly rated. If I have to pick one, I pick centrality. A central line reads tolerably even when wrongly placed, and I have seen plenty of correctly placed lines off centre get into difficulty. The Great Treatise has 二多譽 and 五多功, much praise at the second and much achievement at the fifth, then 三多凶 and 四多懼 in the same passage. That chapter only takes up the second, third, fourth and fifth, and among those four it is three and four that sit off centre.
The reason it gives is proximity to the ruler’s place: the second is far off and safe, the fourth next door and nervous. I half believe it. It accounts for apprehension at the fourth. It does not account for praise at the second, since being out of range explains staying out of trouble and nothing more. I have not found a better explanation, so I go on using it.
Correspondence, and what touches what
Pair first with fourth, second with fifth, third with top. One yin against one yang is a correspondence; two of a kind is not, and some books call that hostility. A line with a correspondence has somebody at the far end it can reach. Second and fifth matter most, both central, and 剛中而應, firm and central and corresponding, turns up repeatedly in the Tuan commentary.
Neighbouring lines are in contact, two ways: the lower carries the one above, which is supporting; the upper sits on the one below, which is riding. Strictly this applies only between yin and yang: a yin under a yang supports it, smoothly, and a yin over a yang rides it, which is usually unfavourable. Some books use both terms loosely for any two neighbours. I keep to the strict sense in my own writing, and reading someone else it depends on the book. I have commentaries doing it each way.
Three layers of text
Everything so far is the diagram. The words come in three layers: the judgement, one sentence for the whole hexagram; the line statements, one apiece, three hundred and eighty-four plus an extra for each of the first two; and the Tuan and the Image, two of the Ten Wings, which explain rather than decide.
The judgement is itself called the tuan, tuan meaning to decide, and the vocabulary gets slippery there: the Tuan commentary comments on judgements, and writers shorten its name until the two senses collide. The Image divides in two, the Great Image one per hexagram and the small Image one per line.
Correct position, centrality, correspondence, supporting and riding appear nowhere in the core text, which says auspicious, inauspicious, regret, blame. The grammar comes out of the Tuan and the Image, fitted onto Bronze Age divination language centuries later. How the two halves came to be bound is the subject of another piece here, What Kind of Book Is the Yi Jing, Actually?
Modesty, layer by layer
Hexagram fifteen is Kun over Gen, earth above mountain: five yin lines and one yang, standing third.
The judgement is 謙：亨，君子有終. Modesty penetrates, and the noble person has an end, meaning the road goes all the way through. The Tuan commentary explains why in four parallel clauses: 天道虧盈而益謙，地道變盈而流謙，鬼神害盈而福謙，人道惡盈而好謙. Heaven, earth, the spirits and human conduct all diminish what is full and add to what is modest.
The Great Image is 地中有山，謙。君子以裒多益寡，稱物平施. A mountain inside the earth rather than standing on top of it, the high thing kept underneath the low.
Now the lines. Initial six: yin in an odd place, so not correctly placed, not central, no correspondence since the fourth above is also yin, and at the very bottom of the figure. Conditions as poor as they come, and the statement is 謙謙君子，用涉大川，吉, modest and modest again, and auspicious. Six in the second: correctly placed, central, supporting the single yang above it, 鳴謙，貞吉. Nine in the third: correctly placed, not central, corresponding with the top line, carrying the other five alone. Its statement is 勞謙君子，有終吉, and the characters to watch are 有終: the judgement said 君子有終, and this line says it again. The sense of the whole hexagram rests on that single yang, which is what the older commentaries call the constituting ruler. Six in the fourth: correctly placed, but sitting on the yang and riding it: 無不利，撝謙, nothing that is not favourable. Six in the fifth: not correctly placed, but central, 不富以其鄰，利用侵伐，無不利. Six at the top: correctly placed, corresponding with the third, 鳴謙，利用行師，征邑國.
The fourth line is the one I cannot make come out. Riding a firm line should cause trouble, and the statement says plainly that nothing is unfavourable. The commentators give versions of one answer, that modesty is a special case and riding does no harm here. It works, and it runs backwards: the statement was already favourable and the rule got a patch. I pass it on as they wrote it, knowing which part is the patch.
There is an old claim that this is the only one of the sixty-four with no unfavourable line. Three are auspicious, two say nothing is unfavourable, the top is neither, so calling all six auspicious overstates it. The small Image there reads 志未得也, the intent has not been attained.
Both roads
Those Bronze Age formulas were matched against a question somebody had asked, and 利涉大川 asks whether the river can be crossed. By the Tuan and the Image, reading has become a way of drawing a principle for conduct out of the figure, and after the Song most readers went that way. Why I use both is in the piece named above. Anyone casting by liuyao skips the line statements, working from the six relatives and the cycle of production and control, which has its own article here, Liuyao Divination, and the only thing the two roads share is the diagram.
Order
My order is always the same. Draw the six lines correctly, bottom to top. Mark the correctly placed ones and the central ones, then work out which pairs correspond. After that, what each line supports or rides. Words last.
Most people work the other way, finding a statement they like the sound of and looking for reasons afterwards. Reasons are always available. Every one of the sixty-four has something in it you can bend toward the answer you already wanted.
If you intend to put work in, learn the eight trigrams cold, figures and associations. The line statements you can look up as you need them.