Great Preponderance

The twenty-eighth hexagram, Da Guo ("Preponderance of the Great"), places Dui (Lake) above Xun (Wind, also Wood). Four strong lines are crowded within two weak ones at top and bottom, the image of a ridgepole too heavy for its ends, bending to the point of breaking. It follows Nourishment in the King Wen sequence.

Da Guo stands 34th of 64 in the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary ordering devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and ascribed to Fu Xi, distinct from its twenty-eighth place in the King Wen sequence traced above. This was the arrangement Joachim Bouvet, a Jesuit in Beijing, sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1701, letting Leibniz read its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of Great Preponderance run yin, yang, yang, yang, yang, 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 Qian over Qian, forming hexagram 1, The Creative (Qian), 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 Preponderance's King Wen partner is hexagram 27, Nourishment (Yi); 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, describes a sagging ridgepole yet still favors having somewhere to go and promises success, for an extraordinary and overloaded time calls for resolute, even unconventional action. The Image speaks of the superior person who, when he must stand alone, is unconcerned and, if he must renounce the world, does so without regret. The core theme is critical excess, a burden at its limit that demands extraordinary measures. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that colors the reading.

Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi, the Song Neo-Confucian synthesis most later readers encountered Da Guo 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 Preponderance (Da Guo), hexagram 28, cannot be paired by inversion, since turning it upside down reproduces the identical figure; instead it is paired by opposition, every line reversed from yang to yin or yin to yang, with Nourishment (Yi), hexagram 27. James Legge's more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads such passages closer to a historical record, against the mystical cast Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German version, carried into English by Cary Baynes in 1950, gave most twentieth-century readers.