Grace

The twenty-second hexagram, Bi ("Grace" or Adornment), places Gen (Mountain) above Li (Fire). Fire glowing at the foot of the mountain, lighting it beautifully, gives the image of form and adornment, the grace that beautifies. It follows Biting Through 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, this Bi stands 23rd of 64, apart from its twenty-second 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 Grace run yang, yin, yang, yin, yin, 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 Zhen over Kan, forming hexagram 40, Deliverance (Xie), 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. Grace's King Wen partner is hexagram 21, Biting Through (Shi He); 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, allows success in small matters and favors having somewhere to go, while implying that grace and ornament are fitting for lesser affairs but should not be relied on where substance is required. The Image speaks of the superior person who brings clarity to everyday matters yet does not presume to decide grave questions by outward form alone. The core theme is beauty and form, valuable but secondary to inner worth. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that refines the counsel.

The core judgment behind this Bi 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, Grace (Bi), hexagram 22, is paired with its inversion: Biting Through (Shi He), hexagram 21. 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.