Great Power

The thirty-fourth hexagram, Da Zhuang ("The Power of the Great"), places Zhen (Thunder) above Qian (Heaven). Thunder rolling high in the heavens gives the image of great vigor and abundant power at its height. It follows Retreat in the King Wen order, turning from withdrawal to advancing strength.

In the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary order devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi, Da Zhuang stands fourth of 64, near the very head of that sequence though thirty-fourth in the King Wen order used 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 Great Power run yang, yang, yang, yang, yin, yin. 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 Dui over Qian, forming hexagram 43, Breakthrough (Guai), 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. Great Power's King Wen partner is hexagram 33, Retreat (Dun); 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, is that perseverance furthers, a terse counsel that great power is safe only when joined to what is right. The Image speaks of the superior person who does not tread any path that is not in keeping with propriety, and the line texts warn, through the picture of a goat butting a hedge and catching its horns, against force used blindly. The core theme is great strength that must be governed by righteousness rather than spent recklessly. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that shades the reading.

Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi, the Song Neo-Confucian synthesis most later readers encountered Da Zhuang through, treated the Judgment above first as a divination formula and only secondarily as moral instruction, a corrective to Cheng Yi's more purely philosophical Yichuan Yizhuan. The Mawangdui silk manuscript, recovered from a sealed Han tomb in 1973 and dated before 168 BCE, preserves closely related material in a wholly different sequence, organized by paired trigrams rather than the King Wen order, evidence that the hexagram texts still circulated in more than one arrangement this late. In the King Wen sequence, Great Power (Da Zhuang), hexagram 34, is paired with its inversion: Retreat (Dun), hexagram 33. 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.