Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Digging for Permanence Before Anything Has Had Time to Form

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Digging for Permanence Before Anything Has Had Time to Form

Duration opens by asking too much of itself and asking too soon. Legge's translation shows the subject deeply desirous of long continuance and gives evil even where there is firm correctness, with no advantage in any direction. The commentary on the image supplies the mechanism: the evil arises from a deep seeking to penetrate at the very commencement of things. Wanting something to last is not the fault. Demanding at the outset that it already be lasting is.

The figure sets thunder above wind, movement above gentle penetration, and its judgement holds that duration succeeds, is without blame, and further favours having somewhere to go. Lasting in this classic is never standing still; it is a course renewed inside a fixed form. A first line is the moment before any of that exists, when there is a beginning and no track behind it, and the text is blunt that a beginning cannot be asked to produce the evidence of an ending.

The stroke is yielding in an odd place, incorrect by the ordinary rule, at the floor of the lower trigram Xun. Xun is the wind and its attribute is penetration, which is why the commentary reaches for the word deep. A soft line at the base of that trigram has the disposition to press inward and none of the standing that would make pressing inward useful, so what it produces is depth with nothing underneath it.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
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

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.