Nourishment

The twenty-seventh hexagram, Yi ("The Corners of the Mouth" or Nourishment), places Gen (Mountain) above Zhen (Thunder). The firm top and bottom lines with open lines between form the image of an open mouth or jaws, the hexagram of nourishment and of what one takes in. It follows The Taming Power of the Great in the King Wen order.

Yi holds a further position in the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary ordering devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi: 31st of 64, apart from its twenty-seventh place in the King Wen sequence above. This was the Fu Xi ordering that the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet sent from Beijing in 1701 to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who recognized its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of Nourishment run yang, yin, yin, yin, 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 Kun over Kun, forming hexagram 2, The Receptive (Kun), 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. Nourishment's King Wen partner is hexagram 28, Great Preponderance (Da Guo); 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 good fortune to perseverance and counsels attention to nourishment, both to how one nourishes others and to what one seeks to fill ones own mouth. The Image speaks of the superior person who is careful of words that leave the mouth and temperate in eating and drinking that enters it. The core theme is nourishment of body and spirit and the discernment of what is worth taking in. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that shades the counsel.

The core judgment behind this Yi belongs to the Zhou Yi, a Western Zhou divination record that Edward Shaughnessy and other scholars now place around the late ninth century BCE, centuries before the Ten Wings commentary layered onto it added the Image and the language of the superior person quoted above. Wang Bi's influential third-century commentary, part of the received Zhouyi zhu, read the resulting text as philosophy rather than as a network of trigram correlations, a stance that shaped how it has been transmitted ever since. In the King Wen sequence, Nourishment (Yi), hexagram 27, cannot be paired by inversion, since turning it upside down reproduces the identical figure; instead it is paired by opposition, every line reversed, with Great Preponderance (Da Guo), hexagram 28. James Legge's more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads such passages closer to a historical record than the mystical cast Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German version, carried into English by Cary Baynes in 1950, gave most twentieth-century readers.