Contemplation

The twentieth hexagram, Guan ("Contemplation" or View), places Xun (Wind) above Kun (Earth). Wind moving over the earth, touching all things, gives the image of a ruler who surveys the land and is in turn observed by the people, a hexagram of viewing and being viewed. It follows Approach in the King Wen order.

Guan 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: 61st of 64, apart from its twentieth place in the King Wen sequence 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 Contemplation run yin, yin, yin, yin, yang, 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 Gen over Kun, forming hexagram 23, Splitting Apart (Bo), 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. Contemplation's King Wen partner is hexagram 19, Approach (Lin); 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, likens the moment to a sacrifice in which the ceremonial washing has been performed but the offering not yet made: a time of reverent attention, when those below look up in trust. The Image speaks of the ancient kings who visited the regions, observed the people and gave them instruction. The core theme is contemplation, the example set by those above and the moral influence of being seen. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that shades the counsel.

Tradition assigns the hexagram statement to King Wen of Zhou, the line statements to the Duke of Zhou and the Ten Wings commentary to Confucius; modern scholarship accepts none of the three attributions, treating the core instead as an anonymous Western Zhou compilation later overlaid, from the fourth to second century BCE, by the Ten Wings that supply the Image and the language of the superior person used above. Between them stand two further layers of reading, Wang Bi's third-century philosophical commentary and Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi; the one played down the trigram image-correlations, the other reasserted the text's identity as a divination manual. In the King Wen sequence, Contemplation (Guan), hexagram 20, is paired with its inversion: Approach (Lin), hexagram 19. 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.