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Exhaustion, and a Name That Resists Translation

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Exhaustion, and a Name That Resists Translation

Hexagram 47 is called Kun, and once again the character is not the Kun of hexagram 2; the two are different words written differently. Wilhelm gives Oppression, with Exhaustion as an alternative; Legge uses Repression; others give Confinement, Adversity or Entangled.

The line texts are among the bleakest in the book. Sitting on a tree stump in a gloomy valley and seeing nobody for three years. Oppressed while at meat and drink. Oppressed by stone, leaning on thorns, entering the house and not seeing the wife. Nose and feet cut off. Oppressed by creeping vines, on unsteady ground.

The mutilation line is worth pausing on: cutting off the nose and the feet were real judicial punishments in the period, and the line is most economically read as recording exactly that. This is one of the passages that makes the case for treating the Zhou Yi as a document of its own society rather than as timeless wisdom. It is the sort of detail that Wilhelm's register tends to smooth over and that later, flatter translations restore.

Against all that, the judgement is favourable: success, perseverance, and the great person brings good fortune without blame. Then a warning that carries the hexagram, when one has something to say, it is not believed. Whatever else is happening, the querent's word is not currently being taken.

That combination, a favourable judgement over line texts describing confinement and punishment, is characteristic of the book and is one of the reasons it resists being reduced to a table of outcomes. The judgement speaks about the situation as a whole; the lines speak about where in it one currently stands.

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