Return

Hexagram 24 is one broken line at the bottom of five unbroken ones, the first yang returning after everything has gone dark, and its judgement contains one of the book's most concrete and most argued-over phrases: on the seventh day comes return.

The plain reading is a cycle of seven units, and the traditional application is calendrical. In the Han-period scheme of sovereign or waxing-and-waning hexagrams, this figure is assigned to the winter solstice: the moment the light begins to come back, marked at the exact point when there is least of it. That assignment is a Han systematisation and not part of the core text, but it fits the figure so well that it has never been dislodged.

What the seven days actually count is disputed. Proposals include seven months, seven stages of a cycle, and the six lines of a hexagram plus one to begin again. The text does not specify. Wilhelm gives the phrase as it stands and lets it be; Legge discusses the difficulty; later translators tend to note it as unresolved.

The judgement also says that friends come without blame, that going out and coming in are without error, and that it furthers one to have somewhere to go. For a hexagram about a turning point at the bottom of a decline, that is a notably practical set of assurances: movement is safe again.

The figure is also the standard illustration of a principle running through the whole book, which is that reversals are located at extremes rather than in the middle. The light returns at the point of least light, not at the point where it would be convenient. Nothing in the sequence turns gradually.

The line texts of hexagram 24 grade the return by how soon it happens, and that gradation is the hexagram's most useful feature in a reading.

The first line is return from a short distance, before going far astray, with no need for remorse. The second is quiet return, good fortune. The third is repeated return, coming back again and again, which the text calls dangerous but not blameworthy. The fourth walks in the midst of others and returns alone. The fifth is noblehearted return, without regret. The sixth is missing the return, and it is the only genuinely bad line in the figure: misfortune, calamities from without, armies defeated, and a ruler whose misfortune lasts ten years.

That scale, from turning back immediately to having left it too late, is the practical content, and it turns the hexagram into a question rather than a statement. The reading is not simply "things are improving"; it is "how far has this gone, and is the return still available?"

The third line is the one readers most often recognise. Repeated return describes the person who keeps correcting course and keeps drifting back, and the text's verdict on them is unusually generous: dangerous, yes, but no blame. A book that had wanted to moralise had an easy opportunity here and declined it.

Wilhelm, Legge and the later versions agree closely on this hexagram, which tends to be true wherever the line texts are structured as a graded series. A sequence leaves the translator much less room than a single dense judgement does.