Deliverance

The fortieth hexagram, Xie ("Deliverance"), places Zhen (Thunder) above Kan (Water). Thunder and rain breaking loose, the storm that clears a tense and heavy air, gives the image of release from difficulty. It follows Obstruction in the King Wen order, the loosening that follows an impasse.

In the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary order devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi, Xie stands 44th of 64, apart from its fortieth position in the King Wen sequence traced 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.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of Deliverance run yin, yang, yin, yang, yin, yin. 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 Li, forming hexagram 63, After Completion (Ji Ji), 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. Deliverance's King Wen partner is hexagram 39, Obstruction (Jian); 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, holds that the southwest furthers, that if nothing more remains to be done a return brings good fortune, and that if something does remain one should attend to it promptly, for tensions relieved should be settled cleanly and quickly. The Image speaks of the superior person who forgives faults and pardons wrongs, in the spirit of the clearing storm. The core theme is deliverance, the resolution of difficulty and the forgiveness that should follow it. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that shades 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 Xie 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.