The Receptive

The second hexagram is six broken lines, the exact inverse of the first, and the relationship between the two is the structural foundation of the entire book. Every other hexagram is a mixture; these two are the poles the mixtures are made from.

Its judgement, in Wilhelm's rendering, promises success through the perseverance of a mare, counsels that one who tries to lead will go astray and one who follows will find guidance, and gives directions, the southwest furthers, the northeast means losing friends. Those compass directions are among the clearest signs of the text's origins: they are practical instructions to somebody about to make a journey, not metaphors, and they belong to the oldest divinatory stratum.

The mare is worth pausing on. It is not a passive animal. A mare is strong, and the image is of strength that carries rather than strength that initiates, which is a considerably more interesting proposition than the word "receptive" suggests in English. Translations that render the hexagram's name as Yielding, Responding, or simply Earth, all catch something Wilhelm's Receptive does not.

Like the first hexagram this one carries an extra statement, "use six", applying when all six lines change and the figure becomes its opposite. Wilhelm reads it as lasting perseverance furthering. What that instruction is actually for is not stated in the text and has been disputed since the Han period.

The convention of reading this hexagram as the complement of the first rather than as its inferior is worth defending. Nothing in the line texts ranks them, and the sequence puts them together precisely because neither functions without the other.

The second hexagram attracts more interpretive baggage than any other, and most of it is imported.

The received English presentation, receptive, devoted, yielding, maternal, and by easy extension feminine, comes to most readers through Wilhelm, and Wilhelm was reading the text through the later Confucian commentarial tradition and through the assumptions of a European scholar writing in the 1920s. The correspondence of yin with the feminine is genuinely present in Chinese thought, but the moral weighting that arrives with it in English translation, in which the hexagram becomes a lesson about the virtue of not leading, is considerably heavier in the translation than in the source.

Legge's 1882 version, which is stiffer and less quotable, is in some respects more careful here because he translates the core text and the commentaries separately and marks which is which. Later translators working from the excavated manuscripts have gone further, treating the line texts as records of ordinary Bronze Age concerns: frost underfoot, a bag tied shut, a field, a dragon fighting in the wilderness with yellow and black blood.

That last line, the sixth, is worth citing against any reading of this hexagram as gentle. Dragons fighting in the open country until their blood runs yellow and black is not an image of devoted service. It is what happens when the yielding principle is pushed to its limit, and the text puts it at the top of the figure without comment or consolation. Readers who have only met this hexagram through its keywords are usually surprised to find it there.