Breakthrough

The forty-third hexagram, Guai ("Breakthrough" or Resolution), places Dui (Lake) above Qian (Heaven). Five strong lines press upward against a single weak line at the top, like water risen to the sky and about to burst, the image of a decisive breakthrough. It follows Increase in the King Wen sequence.

Tradition assigns the hexagram statement to King Wen of Zhou, the line statements to the Duke of Zhou and the Ten Wings commentary to Confucius; modern scholarship accepts none of the three attributions, treating the core instead as an anonymous Western Zhou compilation later overlaid, from the fourth to second century BCE, by the Ten Wings that supply the Image and the language of the superior person used above. Between them stand two further layers of reading, Wang Bi's third-century philosophical commentary and Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi; the one played down the trigram image-correlations, the other reasserted the text's identity as a divination manual. In the King Wen sequence, Breakthrough (Guai), hexagram 43, is paired with its inversion: Coming to Meet (Gou), hexagram 44. Translations of the Judgment vary by tradition: Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German rendering, carried into English by Cary Baynes for the 1950 Bollingen edition, gives the text a mystical, aphoristic cast that shaped most twentieth-century readers' sense of the book, while James Legge's earlier and more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads it closer to a historical record.

The Judgment, in paraphrase, counsels that the matter be made known resolutely at the court of the ruler, that one proceed truthfully though danger remains, that one not resort to arms, and that it furthers to have a fixed goal, for a last inferior element is best removed by open, principled means rather than violence. The Image speaks of the superior person who dispenses riches downward and shuns resting on his virtue. The core theme is breakthrough, the firm and open resolution that clears away what remains of the inferior. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

In the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary order devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi, Guai stands second of 64, near the very head of that sequence though forty-third in the King Wen order used above; it was this arrangement the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet sent from Beijing in 1701 to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who read its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1. Translations of the Judgment above vary substantially by tradition: Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German rendering, carried into English by Cary Baynes for the 1950 Bollingen edition, gives the text a mystical, aphoristic cast that shaped most twentieth-century readers' sense of the book, while James Legge's earlier and more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads the same lines closer to a historical record, and modern scholarly translators such as Richard Rutt and Edward Shaughnessy strip away both registers in an attempt to recover the text's original Western Zhou divinatory idiom.