Chatting about the Zhouyi Cantong Qi (2): Qian and Kun — Gateways of the Change, Parents of the Myriad Hexagrams

"Qian and Kun are the gateways of the Change and the parents of the myriad hexagrams. Kan and Li form the surrounding frame and turn the hub on its axle. The four hexagrams of male and female serve as the bellows, covering and enveloping the Way of yin and yang — like a craftsman or charioteer, following the ink-line and string, holding the reins, aligning to the compass and square, and tracking the rut." Everything in the world does not depart from yin and yang. Once yin and yang are divided, the differences among things become manifest, yielding one characteristic after another. Combine these characteristics and form takes shape; with form comes integrated perception, which is then cognized by people — and thus the myriad things are distinguished one from another. But how are the myriad things generated? The Daodejing says: "The Dao gives birth to them, Virtue rears them, things give them form, circumstances complete them. Therefore the myriad things all honor the Dao and prize Virtue." From the Dao they are born, and from this comes Virtue; the accumulation of Virtue allows the form of things to appear, finally producing integrated perception. This is the principle by which the myriad things honor the Dao and prize Virtue. All things come from the Dao; the process by which a person cognizes a thing is a journey toward the Dao — a reverse process. Then: are the myriad things originally without difference, and only differentiated by the human mind? Or are they originally different, so that people can know them? If things were originally the same, take a stone and bite it — you will know it is utterly a different object from an apple. If things are originally different, then keep subdividing the smallest units composing the myriad things, and eventually you will reach sameness. Here the myriad things are not only physical matter; they include energy and matter. Between energy and matter exists a particle discovered in recent years through large colliders, called the "Higgs boson," which proves that a massless particle can acquire mass through the influence of the Higgs field. If we regard the massless particle as "being" and massive matter as "non-being," this beautifully illustrates a concept in Daodejing philosophy: "being is born of non-being." Moreover one can infer: if the myriad things had no mass, they would all exist as particles of energy. And before that energy-existence, what was there? Tracing further upward, before the myriad things arose, there must have been only One. This is the innate; it is usually given a name called the innate one qi (先天一气). Abstracting things and grasping their core features may be called simplicity (简易); changes among the features of things may be called changeability (变易); and what remains constant at the core may be called constancy (不易). Thus the three concepts of simplicity, changeability, and constancy emerge. In the hexagrams of the Change, every hexagram is composed of yin and yang. The most basic, composed of three yin-yang lines, are the eight trigrams; groups of six form the sixty-four hexagrams. Every symbol expressing yin or yang is called a line (yao). If one examines the sixty-four hexagrams directly, for someone unfamiliar with the Changes the obscure names pose a great barrier. But with the eight trigrams it is much easier to understand. Once the above abstraction is grasped, one understands: the eight trigrams classify the myriad things into eight characteristics. Any characteristic of anything can be sorted into these eight. Qian and Kun — these two characters do not seem easy at first. Yet if you realize that although they are called Qian and Kun, they could equally be called A and B, or Jia and Yi, or alpha and beta — whatever names you give them does not matter, for it is only a naming. One view holds that Qian is heaven and Kun is earth, so Qian and Kun simply mean heaven and earth; most of the time when you see them, just think of heaven and earth, and interpret all Changes numerology accordingly. This understanding is highly misleading. For though Qian and Kun can represent heaven and earth, heaven and earth are only one image of them — not their essence. Qian and Kun can be parent and child, head and belly, husband and wife, round and square. So when we say Qian and Kun, we do not mean merely heaven and earth, nor merely parents, nor merely head and belly — we mean everything that can be classified under the Qian and Kun hexagrams. The ancient sages of China keenly perceived the interconnections among all things, corresponding them and abstracting them into symbols — these symbols are called gua (hexagrams/trigrams). Some say sages knew them at birth and passed them down; others say they were transmitted by divine beings from heaven; still others say they come from prehistory, or even from aliens. Of course these may be listened to lightly but not taken seriously — after all, everything in this world can be explained by three theories: 1. ghosts and gods; 2. aliens; 3. conspiracy theory. Therefore, unless it is truly unavoidable and no other theory can explain something, adopting any of these three will only sink into fantasy. The correspondence between gua and the objective world was not something the ancients invented on a whim; they tested it through actual divination and verification. For example, in divination the Qian trigram often represents an elder, a senior, or a large place. If one casts by time and gets Qian above Kun, and then sees an elderly man passing from the southwest — this proves Qian represents the elder and Kun the southwest: the image has responded. Of course in reality an elder does not always pass from the southwest. Because a gua represents a category, other images matching the gua may occur. Qian can represent round; Kun square. If right then a person is before you and the divination shows a round face with a somewhat square chin — that fits. Divination, in most cases, is first grasping the generation, overcoming, prosperity, and decline of the Five Phases; clearly understanding the independent and combined relations of the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches; and finally flexibly selecting images from the various symbols to make inferences. When analyzing the sixty-four hexagrams, three of the six lines can be extracted to form trigrams for analysis — much like a computer, which in essence is collections of 0 and 1 code. That is hard to understand, so it is abstracted into assembly, then into high-level languages; familiar statements operate the hardware, and people can understand more easily. Then merely forming statements is not enough. For different problems one builds various algorithms with those grammars, forming systems; at the system level one abstracts further into a more familiar model, and humans use it more easily. A common example: if you want to design a beautiful webpage, you need only build the corresponding HTML — however you write the tags, that is what the browser displays — without needing to consider how the lowest-level computer hardware works. Gua have a similar concept. With the above example, when interpreting gua images do not be overly distracted by their yin-yang attributes, because those attributes have been "wrapped" and related to other gua. For instance, although Qian is pure yang, when it represents the head or an elder it is hard to discern the yin-yang relation within — especially since Qian can also represent the right leg, making the yin-yang link even harder to imagine. If it also represents metal or ice, trying to understand through yin and yang becomes still more confused. This is like wrapping 01 machine code into a high-level language: you no longer face operations of 0 and 1, so your mode of thinking must change. In the study of the Change, this yin-yang unit is called a line (yao), much like the smallest machine-code unit in a computer. Yin and yang are relative concepts. Since there is only yin and yang, whenever change occurs, what was yin can be considered to have become yang, and what was yang to have become yin. The Xici says: "The tuan speaks of images; the yao speaks of change." Lines are mainly used to express change. Directly operating on lines presents a problem: their changes are too subtle. For the Change corresponds with Heaven and Earth — vast without exterior, minute without interior. Even if minute to the extreme, it is hard to grasp. But although fine control of yin-yang at the line positions is hard to master, the gua themselves can be grasped directly. It is like using chopsticks to pick up food: you engage more than a hundred muscles in coordinated motion. If you tried to attend to each muscle's movement — let alone the mass of biochemical reactions included — you could never master it. Yet picking up food is very easy, so in most cases what matters is what to pick up, not how. Once grasping that one must operate from a higher angle, the best starting points are the Qian and Kun trigrams — hence they are the gateways of the Change. Because they are pure yang and pure yin, they can also be viewed as single units — as one yang line and one yin line. Typically, Qian over Kun forms the hexagram Heaven-Earth Standstill (Pi); reversed, Kun over Qian forms Earth-Heaven Peace (Tai) — the two are complete opposites. If Qian is one yang line and Kun one yin line, Heaven-Earth Standstill is yang plus yin; Earth-Heaven Peace is yin plus yang. Yang plus yin among the Four Images is Lesser Yin; Lesser Yin is Metal, the qi of austerity and killing — judged inauspicious. Combined, it becomes Heaven-Earth Standstill. The upper trigram is usually taken as going, the lower as coming. Upper is yang, lower is yin; going rides yang and is great, coming rides yin and is small. Shao Yong interpreted it as: great going, small coming. Meaning: much goes out, and on return one is stuck and cannot come back — hence Standstill. Yin plus yang among the Four Images is Lesser Yang; Lesser Yang is Wood, the qi of growth and development — judged auspicious. Combined it becomes Earth-Heaven Peace; reversed it is naturally small going, great coming — little goes out, much comes back, rich harvest. So for business or investment, casting Earth-Heaven Peace is a very good hexagram. Naturally actual divination is not so simple; changing lines must also be considered. Different moving lines in a hexagram produce different changes; any hexagram can become any of the sixty-four through line movement. Its transformations are inexhaustible. Understanding the principle of characteristics reveals the relativity of all things; if things are relative, everything is in change. Suppose you have ten candies and your neighbor has twenty — your neighbor has more. But if another neighbor has more still, your neighbor has less than that one. So does your neighbor have many candies or not? It depends on whom you compare with. Hexagram images work the same way. Qian and Kun can be seen as pure yin-yang opposition because only that contrast exists between them. But Qian and Li: Li is formed by changing the middle line of Qian from yang to yin. In that case their relation is not a completely opposed-yet-unified relation like Qian and Kun. Because Qian's middle line was changed to yin, it became Li; for Li to become Qian, its middle yin must become yang. In this world, yang turning to yin is easy, yin to yang harder. So in this pair the focus falls on Li; abstracted to life, hexagrams formed by Qian and Li often represent consumption, loss, deficit — needing conditions to be fulfilled for completeness. So Heaven-Fire Fellowship (Tongren): fire under heaven, like holding up a torch so others are drawn over. Divining it often means gatherings of people, or motives to attract the public — accumulation through consumption. Whether investment yields enough return depends on its change. Conversely, Fire-Heaven Great Possession (Dayou): fire in the sky, light illuminating all directions — a greatly auspicious image. But for an individual it may not be, because Great Possession means large expenditure to care for others — often very great consumption. Whether that is good depends on whether virtue matches position, and on the prosperity and decline of the phases. In internet or logistics business, getting Dayou means large scale; large consumption is normal and can be considered good. If virtue does not match position, it means paying out of your own pocket to subsidize others — naturally bad. All this is not to say how to divine, but to expound principles. The transformation between Qian and Li is a very important concept. Kan and Li are water and fire, representing change without constant form; Qian and Kun are pure yang and pure yin, which stabilize and highlight the presentation of yin and yang. Similarly, the relation between Kan and Kun is alike: the difference between water-Kan and Kun is changing the middle line from yin to yang, and Kan's middle yang is supported by yin; yang becoming yin is easy, so their relation is mainly expressed in Kun's nature — a relation of conquest, containment, identification, absorption, transformation, assimilation. Hence the hexagram they form, Earth-Water Army (Shi), means marching out — armies marching out are for war; war aims to conquer targets and obtain benefits. In human affairs it likewise includes struggle, seeking, acquiring. It should also be noted that because a yang line is sandwiched between yin lines, it also means one must follow certain restraints, or accidents will occur. The saying "learn from nature" (师法自然) is not only to take nature as teacher; its deeper meaning is to obtain and transform from nature — but such obtaining must be restrained; blind action produces accidents. Conversely, Water-Earth Holding Together (Bi): water over earth. Water moves gently in all directions without conflicting with earth, changing according to terrain. If Army (Shi) actively changes the target, Bi complies with change. If one divines Bi from Kan, and prosperity/decline has not reversed the image, and someone asks after a breakup whether they can reconcile — usually one can judge no. Why? Because Bi is compliance with change; having already split, wanting to reunite is too hard. So the lucky who cast Bi naturally find it good; the unlucky get Bi and continue to be unlucky. Thus Bi in divination is often said to imply "delay" — this is the reason. Understanding the above: as a pair, Qian and Kun represent yin and yang opposed yet unified; yin and yang are the entrances and exits of the Change — hence called the gateways of the Change. And since all gua can come from yin-yang combinations, Qian and Kun as parents of the myriad hexagrams is no surprise. The "surrounding frame" of Kan and Li means outline. Water and fire have no constant form, so they mostly describe something imagistic. Later we will return to the meaning of "the two uses have no line positions." These four gua are called the four male-female hexagrams; descriptions of all things can use them — hence "serve as the bellows, covering and enveloping the Way of yin and yang." Tuoyue (bellows) refers to a bag that can expand and contract; in ancient times it was a bellows for blowing fire. It does not refer to a specific location, but to this image — as the Daodejing says: "Empty yet unexhausted; the more it moves, the more it produces." Some cultivation texts that miss the method call tuoyue a specific location — wrong; others metaphorically call it the function of the lungs that breathe, thus implying the lungs — also wrong. Clinging to images rather than the source is one-sided. How could the great Way of Heaven and Earth be so low-level? Then arises a question: the transformations of Qian with Li, and Kan with Kun — why must Kan and Li be copulated into Qian and Kun? From the earlier images: Kun over Kan forms Earth-Water Army, able to actively change; Qian over Li has the sense of accumulation. Choosing these two is naturally ideal. By contrast, Li over Qian merely consumes; Kan over Kun can only comply with the existing situation — clearly unable to reverse and seize the creative work of Heaven and Earth. The keen may now notice: Li over Qian's consumption and Kan over Kun's compliance perfectly depict ordinary human activity — it is in fact a form of "following." Yet "reversal is the movement of the Dao"; cultivation must proceed against this process. Whether following or reversing, both are behaviors allowed within Heaven-and-Earth rules. People often say cultivation is going against Heaven — not entirely correct, for such a concept of "Heaven" is narrow. Understanding that hexagrams like Heaven-Fire Fellowship and Earth-Water Army must be constructed by certain rules and restraints, one also understands: "like a craftsman or charioteer, following the ink-line and string, holding the reins, aligning to the compass and square, and tracking the rut." What exactly are these rules and restraints, and how are they obtained? We will explain in detail later.

Originally published on the WeChat public account "Yinfu Culture of the Daoist Tradition"