Great Taming

The twenty-sixth hexagram, Da Xu ("The Taming Power of the Great"), places Gen (Mountain) above Qian (Heaven). The creative force of heaven held within the still mountain gives the image of a great power stored and disciplined, strength held in reserve. It follows Innocence in the King Wen sequence.

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 Xu stands seventh of 64, apart from its twenty-sixth 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 Great Taming run yang, yang, 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 Dui, forming hexagram 54, The Marrying Maiden (Gui Mei), 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 Taming's King Wen partner is hexagram 25, Innocence (Wu Wang); 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, rewards perseverance, holds that not eating at home (that is, serving in public rather than idling privately) brings good fortune, and favors crossing the great water, for accumulated strength is meant to be put to great use. The Image speaks of the superior person who studies the words and deeds of the past to build up virtue. The core theme is the great restraint that stores energy and knowledge until they can act decisively. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that adjusts the reading.

The Judgment and Image paraphrased above draw on two of the Ten Wings, commentarial texts appended to the Yijing and traditionally credited to Confucius, though the attribution was already doubted within the Chinese tradition by the eleventh century and modern scholarship instead dates their composition to roughly the fourth to second century BCE, well after the Zhou Yi core itself. Wang Bi's third-century commentary read passages like this one from Da Xu philosophically, playing down the trigram image-correlations earlier commentators relied on, while Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi pushed back the other way, insisting the book remain readable as the divination manual it began as.