Biting Through

The twenty-first hexagram, Shi He ("Biting Through"), places Li (Fire) above Zhen (Thunder). The figure resembles an open mouth (the firm lines at top and bottom) with an obstruction between the teeth, so that one must bite through it. It follows Contemplation in the King Wen sequence.

Shi He stands 27th of 64 in the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary ordering devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and ascribed to Fu Xi, distinct from its twenty-first place in the King Wen sequence traced above. This was the arrangement Joachim Bouvet, a Jesuit in Beijing, sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1701, letting Leibniz read its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of Biting Through run yang, yin, yin, yang, yin, yang. A later interpretive layer absent from the original Zhou Yi, the nuclear hexagram (hu gua), treats lines two through four as a lower trigram and lines three through five as an upper one; here they combine as Kan over Gen, forming hexagram 39, Obstruction (Jian), a hidden figure first associated with the Han-dynasty scholar Jing Fang, whose Yijing commentary of the first century BCE is credited with the earliest appearance of nuclear trigrams. Biting Through's King Wen partner is hexagram 22, Grace (Bi); most of the sixty-four pair this way, related by turning the whole figure upside down, while the eight hexagrams built from a single doubled trigram pair instead by inverting every line. Mawangdui (1973) orders hexagrams by trigram, not King Wen; names here follow Wilhelm and Baynes, 1950, not Legge, 1882.

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises success and favors the administration of justice, for when something obstructs union it must be energetically removed, as teeth bite through what lies between them. The Image joins thunder and lightning, and speaks of the ancient kings who made firm the laws and clear the penalties. The core theme is decisive action, including just correction, against an obstacle. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that colors the reading.

The Judgment and Image paraphrased above draw on two of the Ten Wings, commentarial texts appended to the Yijing and traditionally credited to Confucius, though the attribution was already doubted within the Chinese tradition by the eleventh century and modern scholarship instead dates their composition to roughly the fourth to second century BCE, well after the Zhou Yi core itself. Wang Bi's third-century commentary read passages like this one from Shi He philosophically, playing down the trigram image-correlations earlier commentators relied on, while Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi pushed back the other way, insisting the book remain readable as the divination manual it began as.