Dispersion

The fifty-ninth hexagram, Huan ("Dispersion" or Dissolution), places Xun (Wind) above Kan (Water). Wind moving over the water, scattering it into spray and dissolving what is frozen, gives the image of the breaking up of rigidity and division. It follows The Joyous in the King Wen order.

In the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary order devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi, Huan stands 45th of 64, apart from its fifty-ninth position in the King Wen sequence traced above; it was this arrangement the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet sent from Beijing in 1701 to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who read its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of Dispersion run yin, yang, 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 Zhen, forming hexagram 27, Nourishment (Yi), 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. Dispersion's King Wen partner is hexagram 60, Limitation (Jie); 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, promises success, pictures the king approaching his temple to reunite the people in reverence, and favors crossing the great water, for this is a time to dissolve hardness of heart and egotism and so to gather what has been scattered. The Image speaks of the ancient kings who offered sacrifice and built temples to draw the divided together. The core theme is dispersion of what has grown rigid or estranged, dissolving barriers to restore union. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that shades the reading.

The core judgment behind Huan belongs to the Zhou Yi, a Western Zhou divination record that Edward Shaughnessy and other scholars now place around the late ninth century BCE, centuries before the Ten Wings commentary layered onto it added the Image and the language of the superior person quoted above. Wang Bi's influential third-century commentary, part of the received Zhouyi zhu, read the resulting text as philosophy rather than as a network of trigram correlations, a stance that shaped how it has been transmitted ever since. In the King Wen sequence, Dispersion (Huan), hexagram 59, is paired with its inversion: Limitation (Jie), hexagram 60. 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 that shaped most twentieth-century readers' sense of the book, 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 than a philosophical one.