Enthusiasm

The sixteenth hexagram, Yu ("Enthusiasm"), places Zhen (Thunder) above Kun (Earth). Thunder bursting forth from the earth, the storm breaking after long stillness, gives the image of an energy that rouses and carries all things into movement. It stands sixteenth in the King Wen sequence.

In the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary order devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi, Yu stands 60th of 64, well apart from its sixteenth 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 Enthusiasm run yin, yin, 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 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. Enthusiasm's King Wen partner is hexagram 15, Modesty (Qian); 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, favors appointing helpers and setting armies in motion, for enthusiasm well directed gathers others and makes great enterprises possible. The Image recalls the ancient kings making music to honor the divine and their ancestors, since inspired feeling, given form, unites people. The core theme is enthusiasm and readiness that move a group. Lines received as moving lines change to their opposites, yielding a second, related hexagram that shades the counsel.

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, Enthusiasm (Yu), hexagram 16, is paired with its inversion: Modesty (Qian), hexagram 15. Translations of the Judgment above 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, 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.