Limitation

The sixtieth hexagram, Jie ("Limitation" or Regulation), places Kan (Water) above Dui (Lake). Water over the lake, which can hold only so much before it overflows, gives the image of the need for limits and measure. It follows Dispersion in the King Wen sequence, since dissolution in turn requires restraint.

Jie holds a further position in the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary ordering devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi: fourteenth of 64, apart from its sixtieth place in the King Wen sequence above. This was the Fu Xi ordering that the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet sent from Beijing in 1701 to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who recognized its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of Limitation run yang, yang, yin, yin, 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 Gen over Zhen, forming hexagram 27, Nourishment (Yi), 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. Limitation's King Wen partner is hexagram 59, Dispersion (Huan); 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 success but adds that bitter or galling limitation must not be persevered in, for boundaries make freedom and order possible yet must themselves be moderate. The Image speaks of the superior person who creates number and measure and examines the nature of virtue and correct conduct. The core theme is limitation and measure, the discipline that channels energy, provided the limits are not so harsh as to become unbearable. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

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 Jie 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.