Institute of Semantic Restructuring

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2007:26:10

Sun / Decrease

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The text notwithstanding, nor the received order of the hexagrams, the first thing to note about Sun is that while the upper trigram is still the purple mountain's majesty the lower has transformed from that of the raging abyss, which manifests at the foot of a mountain as an abundant spring, into the joyous lake. This is an easy extrapolation, one repeated 8 times throughout the cycle of cycles we see as we build and explore the hexagrams in what I would today call construction order or order of building light. Perhaps there was reason to submerge the cycles within cycles, wheels within wheels aspect of watching the hexagram grow from all yin to all yang, but when taking them in this order it is hard to miss. So today I digress and look for a moment at the trigrams each in turn.

K'un, Mother, all yin, Earth, receiving and nurturing all things (good and bad, if it needs repeating here.) This is binary zero.

Chen, youngest son, first light, "the arousing thunder", energy springing up from the earth. This is binary one.

K'an, the middle son, the gorge or abyss or ravine. In Meng/Youthful Folly it becomes an abundant spring. There is pressure and speed and even danger here, but a more manifest power than the potential of his younger brother. This is binary two.

Tui, the youngest daughter, joyous, the marsh or lake. Note that the six mixed trigrams take their gender from the odd line rather than the predominating lines. Combining the potential and shock of first light with the manifestation of the abyss we get a joyous lake. This is binary three.

Ken, the mountain, boundary, stillness, the oldest son. Where Chen is fleeting and evanescent but scintillating in its energy, Ken is the stately older brother, slow, placid, solid. The boundaries of the kingdom are set in nature by the existence of impassable mountain ranges, and Ken gives us that kind of manifest delineation, telling us, and keeping us, where we are. This is binary four.

Li, radiance, fire, brightness, the visual opposite or complement of her brother, K'an, she is a dark line of potential in the middle of two light lines of manifestation. This is binary five.

Sun, Wood and wind, the eldest daughter, with her receptive yin submerged beneath two ascendant lines of manifestation. This is binary six.

Ch'ien, Father, all male, all light, all manifest, no receptivity, all convex, no concave, making making making, never taking. This is binary seven, and completes the move from all dark to all light.

We will travel that cycle eight times, and each time we travel it we will visit it for eight sub-cycles. Hexagrams zero through seven have K'un as their top trigram, public face, conscious theme, outer hook, and in turn we contemplate this upper, outer, conscious state with each of the others in turn as the inner reality, then we do the same with Chen, the arousing as the outer, each of the others in turn as the inner. And so we go through the cycles within the cycles, the wheels within the wheels, and we attune ourselves to the ebb and flow of the light and the dark, knowing that neither is good or evil of itself but that our capacity to work for the good or suffer evil is predicated largely on our ability to discern the subtle differences between shades of grey.

That might be the most compelling view of the hexagrams. Where the peasant seeks a simple yes or no answer, a vision of the future as holding good or ill, evidenced by a simple single yin or yang, the seeker strives to encompass the difference between old yin, new yin, new yang and old yang, shown by two lines. But even this state of sagacity, encompassing twice as many distinctions as the prior level of development, is not enough, and so we add one more line, and now have eight gradations from absolute no to absolute yes and rather than mere flip-flopping alternation we are drawn to think of progression and cycle.

Did the ancients first try to encompass a 4 bit moral logic, four lines yielding 16 subtle shades of yes/no/maybe/maybe-not? Or did they instantly jump to the 6 bits of the hexagram by positing outer and inner and observing the cycles within the cycles? We know that the received texts offer analysis of so-called nuclear trigrams within hexagrams, so it is not far-fetched to think that at one point the ancients sought directly to distinguish 64 points from all dark to all light. But the easier way to achieve that goal is to observe them as the two chunks of outer and inner, upper and lower. Still, if we accept that challenge, of learning to discern the hexagrams as 8 cycles of 8, do we view it as simply a mnemonic to hold us steady as we learn to discern and distinguish the various arrays of energy more directly?

Back to Decrease. I've received this many times, and have always been a little off-put by the unevenness of the reading. I tend to hold to the parts that seem most essential, the reversals and reframes. Decrease is not always bad, the breath must go out before the next inhale can begin. But the Wilhelm/Baynes also says:

This is out and out decrease. If the foundations of a building are decreased in strength and the upper walls are strengthened, the whole structure loses its stability.

Frankly, that doesn't fit for me in the conversion of the inner trigram from spring to lake. The only decrease I see is one of pressure, from a gushing to an easier state of simply being, with the flow hidden from the casual eye. The Wilhelm/Baynes, contradicting itself, also says of this hexagram:

The lake at the foot of the mountain evaporates. In this way it decreases to the benefit of the mountain, which is enriched by its moisture...By this decrease of the lower powers of the psyche, the higher aspects of the soul are enriched.

Sympathetic as I am to that observation, it conflicts with the earlier metaphor about foundations, and it doesn't really flow from the image---evaporation isn't the first thing one thinks of when one thinks of lakes. And the moisture on the mountain probably comes less from such evaporation than from the same rains that feed the lake; the lake is the beneficiary of water that the mountain could not hold.

So I'm left at odds with the received text. Such is the arrogance of the self-taught, about which we read in other hexagrams. For now I close with the simple teaching device, that we are waltzing through the cycle of eight from K'un to Ch'ien, repeating each eight times, holding the outer constant while the inner cycles. Perhaps, on reaching 63, that is how I will cycle back down, holding the inner solid and letting the outer whirl through the cycles.