Retreat

The thirty-third hexagram, Dun ("Retreat"), places Qian (Heaven) above Gen (Mountain). The mountain rises but heaven withdraws ever higher above it, the image of the strong retreating in good order as darker forces gain ground. It follows Duration in the King Wen sequence.

Dun stands 49th 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 thirty-third 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 Retreat run yin, yin, yang, 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 Qian over Xun, forming hexagram 44, Coming to Meet (Gou), 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. Retreat's King Wen partner is hexagram 34, Great Power (Da Zhuang); 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 in retreat and holds that in small matters perseverance still furthers, for a timely and dignified withdrawal preserves strength rather than wasting it in a losing stand. The Image speaks of the superior person who keeps inferior forces at a distance, not with anger but with reserve and dignity. The core theme is strategic retreat, yielding ground deliberately while the time is unfavorable. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

The core judgment behind Dun belongs to the Zhou Yi, a Western Zhou divination record that Edward Shaughnessy and other scholars now place around the late ninth century BCE, centuries before the Ten Wings commentary layered onto it added the Image and the language of the superior person quoted above. Wang Bi's influential third-century commentary, part of the received Zhouyi zhu, read the resulting text as philosophy rather than as a network of trigram correlations, a stance that shaped how it has been transmitted ever since. In the King Wen sequence, Retreat (Dun), hexagram 33, is paired with its inversion: Great Power (Da Zhuang), hexagram 34. 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 that shaped most twentieth-century readers' sense of the book, while James Legge's earlier and more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East series reads the same lines closer to a historical record than a philosophical one.