Conflict

The sixth hexagram of the King Wen sequence, Song ("Conflict"), places the trigram Qian (Heaven) above Kan (Water). Each hexagram of the I Ching is built from two of the eight trigrams; here heaven rises while water sinks, two forces that pull apart, the classical image of dispute. It follows hexagram 5 in the traditional order of the sixty-four and stands as one of the early figures concerned with the beginnings of strife.

In the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary order devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi, Song stands 41st of 64, a different position from its sixth place in the King Wen sequence traced above; this was the 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.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of Conflict run yin, yang, yin, yang, yang, 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 Xun over Li, forming hexagram 37, The Family (Jia Ren), 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. Conflict's King Wen partner is hexagram 5, Waiting (Xu); 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, warns that sincerity meets obstruction; one should be cautious and halt midway rather than press a quarrel to the bitter end, and it is fortunate to seek a great and impartial person while unfavorable to embark on a great undertaking. The Image counsels considering the beginning of any affair, since conflict is best avoided before it starts. The core theme is dispute and litigation held in check. As in every hexagram, any line received as a moving (changing) line transforms into its opposite, yielding 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 Song 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.