Innocence

The twenty-fifth hexagram, Wu Wang ("Innocence" or the Unexpected), places Qian (Heaven) above Zhen (Thunder). Thunder rolling under heaven, following the natural movement of the seasons, gives the image of what is spontaneous, free of calculation and true to nature. It stands twenty-fifth in the King Wen order.

Wu Wang stands 25th 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, the same number it happens to carry in the King Wen sequence traced above, though the two orderings are built on entirely different principles. 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 Innocence run yang, yin, yin, yang, 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 Xun over Gen, forming hexagram 53, Development (Jian), 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. Innocence's King Wen partner is hexagram 26, Great Taming (Da Xu); 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 supreme success through perseverance, but warns that one who departs from what is right will meet misfortune and that it does not favor scheming undertakings; the innocent should simply act rightly and let results follow. The Image speaks of the ancient kings who, rich in virtue and in tune with the times, nourished all beings. The core theme is naturalness and integrity free of ulterior motive. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

Tradition assigns the hexagram statement to King Wen of Zhou, the line statements to the Duke of Zhou and the Ten Wings commentary to Confucius; modern scholarship accepts none of the three attributions, treating the core instead as an anonymous Western Zhou compilation later overlaid, from the fourth to second century BCE, by the Ten Wings that supply the Image and the language of the superior person used above. Between them stand two further layers of reading, Wang Bi's third-century philosophical commentary and Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi; the one played down the trigram image-correlations, the other reasserted the text's identity as a divination manual.