Revolution

Hexagram 49 has left a mark on modern Chinese that no other hexagram has, and the etymology is worth setting out.

The name is Ge. Its root sense is an animal hide, specifically a hide that has been stripped and prepared, and by extension the shedding or changing of a skin. From that comes the sense of thoroughgoing change, of a thing replaced rather than adjusted. The compound geming, which pairs this character with the word for mandate or decree, means the changing of the mandate: the removal of a ruler's authority to rule. It is the standard modern Chinese word for revolution, and it comes from this conceptual family.

That is not a coincidence retrofitted onto the hexagram. The Zhou dynasty's own legitimating story was that the mandate of heaven had passed from the Shang to them, and the text was compiled by people for whom the overthrow of a dynasty was recent political history rather than theory.

Wilhelm gives Revolution, with Moulting as an alternative, and both are right. Legge uses Change. Later translations sometimes give Skinning or Hide, keeping the physical image.

The judgement says that on one's own day one is believed, that the change is credited only when its time has fully come, and the line texts include the tiger and the panther changing their markings, and the inferior person changing only his face. That last distinction, between a real change and a cosmetic one, is the hexagram's sharpest observation, and it is made in the vocabulary of animal pelts rather than of ethics.

Hexagram 49 describes change of a specific kind, and getting the kind right is the whole reading.

This is not adjustment, improvement or growth. It is replacement: the old thing removed and a new thing put in its place, with a discontinuity between them. The image of moulting is exact, the skin is not mended, it is shed. Readings that soften the figure into general transformation lose the sense that something is being ended deliberately, by someone, and that the ending is the point.

The timing constraint is the second half. The judgement's insistence that belief comes on the day itself is echoed in the first line, which counsels wrapping in the hide of a yellow cow, being bound, holding still, and in the second, which says that change should be made on one's own day. The text is unusually emphatic that premature change fails. What is required is not enthusiasm but the right moment, and the hexagram spends most of its length saying so.

The top line closes the figure with the distinction already noted: the superior person changes like a panther, the inferior changes only his face. Continuing beyond this point brings misfortune; remaining in the new condition brings good fortune. The counsel is to stop once the change is made.

In reading practice this is one of the strongest indications in the book that a situation will not be salvaged by repair. Its counterpart, hexagram 50, describes what is built afterwards, and the two should be read as one argument rather than as two verdicts.

Where the figure is most often misapplied is in questions about personal change. It is not a hexagram about growth, and a querent hoping to be told they are developing well has usually been told something considerably more disruptive.

Hexagram 49's political charge makes it a convenient place to address a claim about the book's structure that is frequently overstated.

The King Wen sequence is the received order of the sixty-four hexagrams, and it is not arithmetical. It is built largely out of pairs, a figure followed by its inversion, or where inverting produces the same figure, by its complement, and it is the order in which the text has been transmitted for two millennia. Why the pairs fall where they do is not fully explained by anything in the text.

A second arrangement, the Fu Xi or before-heaven order, is arithmetical. Attributed to the legendary Fu Xi but actually devised by the eleventh-century scholar Shao Yong, it arranges the hexagrams so that reading broken and unbroken lines as digits produces a straight binary count. Shao Yong did not use it to calculate; the arrangement was cosmological.

In 1703 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had developed binary arithmetic independently and was in correspondence with the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet in Beijing, published the first European commentary connecting the two. The correspondence is real, the mathematical fact is real, and Leibniz took it as evidence that an ancient wisdom had anticipated his notation.

What is not true is that the I Ching is a binary system, or that the King Wen sequence encodes one. The binary reading applies to a specific eleventh-century rearrangement, not to the transmitted book. The Mawangdui manuscript, recovered in 1973, gives a third order again, grouped by upper trigram, and whether it is older than King Wen's is disputed.