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I Ching Hexagrams

Oppression

KWEN
Kun

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Origin 1000 BCE to 350 BCE

King Wen hexagram 47, Oppression or Exhaustion (Kun), places the Lake above Water: the lake drained dry with the water sunk below it, an image of being emptied, confined, and exhausted. It describes adversity, hardship, and confinement, a time when one energy and resources are depleted and the superior person is oppressed by circumstance or by inferior people. Its Judgment says that success is still possible for the persevering, that the great person brings good fortune and remains without blame, but that words now count for nothing and are not believed. Its Image counsels the superior person to stake their life on following their will, keeping cheerful and true even under the greatest constraint. As a reading it marks a low, straitened, testing time, urging one to hold to inner integrity in silence, since complaint is useless and only steadfast character wins through.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1000 BCE to 350 BCE 1Tradition: Zhou Yi, the Western Zhou divination core
Origin Period
1924 to 1950 2Tradition: Wilhelm-Baynes I Ching (1950)
Origin Period
400 BCE to 100 BCE 3Tradition: Zhou Yi and the Ten Wings
Origin Period
This hexagram's dating spans three distinct historical layers: the divinatory judgment text of the Zhouyi core, composed in the early Western Zhou around 1000 BCE and recovered in the Mawangdui silk manuscripts; the Ten Wings commentary tradition that gave the hexagrams their later philosophical reading, compiled across the Warring States and Han periods by around 400 BCE; and the English title used here, coined in Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German translation and carried into English by Cary Baynes. 2
Attributed Author / Compiler
By tradition: the hexagram statements to King Wen of Zhou, the line statements to the Duke of Zhou, and the Ten Wings to Confucius. 3Tradition: Zhou Yi and the Ten Wings
Attributed Author / Compiler
No named author. The core is a Western Zhou compilation with no compiler on record, and the ascription of the Ten Wings to Confucius was already being questioned inside the Chinese tradition by the eleventh century and is defended by no current scholarship. 3
Language
Classical Chinese 4
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Oppression, with Exhaustion as an alternative; Legge gives Repression. The register smooths the line texts into adversity in the abstract. 5Tradition: Wilhelm-Baynes I Ching (1950)
Meaning in the Attesting Source
The line about the nose and the feet being cut off records real judicial punishments of the period. Read as a document of its own society the figure is about confinement, humiliation and mutilation, and the flatter translations restore what the received register removes. 4Tradition: Zhou Yi, the Western Zhou divination core
Identity
King Wen Number
47 1
Native Name
Kun 1
Attributions
Trigram Pairing
Lake over Water 1
Order
Position in the Sequence
42 2Tradition: Xiantian (Earlier Heaven) arrangement of Shao Yong
Position in the Sequence
47 2Tradition: King Wen sequence, the received order
Learn More
Exhaustion, and a Name That Resists Translation

Hexagram 47 is called Kun, and once again the character is not the Kun of hexagram 2; the two are different words written differently. Wilhelm gives Oppression, with Exhaustion as an alternative; Legge uses Repression; others give Confinement, Adversity or Entangled.

The line texts are among the bleakest in the book. Sitting on a tree stump in a gloomy valley and seeing nobody for three years. Oppressed while at meat and drink. Oppressed by stone, leaning on thorns, entering the house and not seeing the wife. Nose and feet cut off. Oppressed by creeping vines, on unsteady ground.

The mutilation line is worth pausing on: cutting off the nose and the feet were real judicial punishments in the period, and the line is most economically read as recording exactly that. This is one of the passages that makes the case for treating the Zhou Yi as a document of its own society rather than as timeless wisdom. It is the sort of detail that Wilhelm's register tends to smooth over and that later, flatter translations restore.

Against all that, the judgement is favourable: success, perseverance, and the great person brings good fortune without blame. Then a warning that carries the hexagram, when one has something to say, it is not believed. Whatever else is happening, the querent's word is not currently being taken.

That combination, a favourable judgement over line texts describing confinement and punishment, is characteristic of the book and is one of the reasons it resists being reduced to a table of outcomes. The judgement speaks about the situation as a whole; the lines speak about where in it one currently stands.

Being at the End of One's Resources

Hexagram 47 describes depletion, and its distinctive contribution is that it separates being exhausted from being wrong.

The judgement insists on success and on blamelessness while the line texts describe humiliation, confinement and punishment. That combination is unusual and it is the reading. The situation is genuinely bad, the querent's resources are genuinely spent, and none of that is presented as a verdict on their conduct. Traditional commentary connects the figure to the person of integrity in a period that has no use for them.

The most practically useful line is the one about not being believed. A great many consultations that produce this hexagram involve a querent who is telling the truth to people who are not receiving it, and the text's counsel is not to argue harder. Persuasion is not available in this condition. What is available, in the traditional reading, is holding the position without spending further energy defending it.

The figure's water trigram sits below a lake, which the Image reads as a lake with no water in it, drained, exposed, its bed showing. That is an unusually exact picture of the state, and it is one of the places where the commentarial trigram system earns its keep.

Readers should be careful not to soften this hexagram. It is one of the few in the book that describes a bad period with no immediate turn in it, and the honest reading says so rather than hunting the line texts for a consolation they do not contain. What the hexagram offers instead is the assurance that the depletion is not a judgement, which for most querents in this condition is the more useful thing to hear.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Corresponds To

Channel of Abstraction, Human Design Channels

Channel of Abstraction bridges Hexagram 47, Oppression, and Hexagram 64, Before Completion, per its own iching-correspondence fact; this edge names the 47 side.

Source The Human Design SystemRa Uru Hu (Alan Robert Krakower)
From Oppression to Transfiguration, Gene Keys

Gene Key 47, From Oppression to Transfiguration, corresponds to Hexagram 47, Oppression, per its own iching-correspondence fact.

Source Gene Keys: Embracing Your Higher PurposeRichard Rudd
Mental Realization, Human Design Gates

Human Design Gate 47, Mental Realization, corresponds to Hexagram 47, Oppression, per its own iching-correspondence fact.

Source The Human Design SystemRa Uru Hu (Alan Robert Krakower)

Disciplines That Use This

I Ching, Disciplines

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Originates in Language

Classical Chinese, Languages
Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Reached by Changing Lines

Conflict, Line 6, Hexagram Lines
Source The Sacred Books of the East, Volume XVI: The Yi KingJames Legge (trans.)
Deliverance, Line 5, Hexagram Lines
Gathering Together, Line 2, Hexagram Lines
Great Preponderance, Line 3, Hexagram Lines
Source The Sacred Books of the East, Volume XVI: The Yi KingJames Legge (trans.)
The Abysmal, Line 4, Hexagram Lines
Source The Sacred Books of the East, Volume XVI: The Yi KingJames Legge (trans.)
The Joyous, Line 1, Hexagram Lines
Sources
1. I Ching: The Classic of Changes, translated with an introduction and commentary, the first English translation of the newly discovered second-century BC Mawangdui texts
Edward L. Shaughnessy (trans.), Ballantine Books, 1996On the dating and composition of the Zhou Yi core
2. Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in China
Richard J. Smith, University of Virginia Press, 2008On Shao Yong's xiantian ordering of the sixty-four hexagramsView the Source
3. The Five "Confucian" Classics
Michael Nylan, Yale University Press, 2001On the authorship question and the critique of the traditional ascriptionsView the Source
4. Zhouyi: The Book of Changes
Richard Rutt (trans.), Curzon Press, 1996On the judicial mutilation line read literallyView the Source
5. The I Ching, or Book of Changes
Richard Wilhelm (trans.); Cary F. Baynes (English trans.), Princeton University Press, 1980Hexagram 47, the Judgement and the line textsView the Source

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