Mountain 17 of the twenty-four mountains (luopan) is Kun, one of only four trigrams placed on the ring, occupying position SW2, due southwest, 217.5 to 232.5 degrees. Kun is the Receptive, Earth, the Mother in the family of trigrams set out in the Shuogua, the Discussion of the Trigrams, and it belongs to the phase Earth; its associated animal is the mare and its body part the belly. Doubled upon itself Kun forms hexagram 2, The Receptive, whose reading counsels devotion and capacious support, the power to sustain and complete what the creative begins.
Of the eight trigrams of the Bagua, only the four occupying the diagonal, ordinal directions, Qian, Kun, Gen and Xun, appear as named mountains on the twenty-four position ring; the four cardinal trigrams, Kan, Li, Zhen and Dui, are not separately inscribed because their own Later Heaven positions, north, south, east and west, coincide with the ring's four pure cardinal branches instead. In the Earlier Heaven (Fuxi) sequence, a second traditional arrangement of the same eight trigrams recorded separately in this atlas, Kun occupies the north, opposite its Later Heaven position of the southwest, a reminder that the twenty-four mountain ring follows only the Later Heaven scheme and not the Fuxi one.