The Abysmal

Hexagram 29 is the doubled water trigram, and its name, Kan, is one of the places where the received English translation has drifted a long way from the underlying word.

Wilhelm gives The Abysmal, which in English suggests depth, dread and something close to the sublime. The character more plainly means a pit or a hole in the ground, something dug, or fallen into, of the kind a person or an animal could be trapped in. Legge is closer to that. Later translators working from the Bronze Age material generally render it as pit, and read the hexagram as being about literal traps and holes before it is about anything metaphysical.

The line texts support the flatter reading. They speak of falling into a pit within a pit, of a pit not being filled, of being bound with cords and placed among thorns, and of not obtaining anything for three years. This is the vocabulary of capture and imprisonment, not of the void.

That does not make the deeper reading illegitimate. The Ten Wings and the whole subsequent tradition built the hexagram into a teaching about danger met with sincerity, and Wilhelm's rendering carries that beautifully. But it is a construction on top of a much more concrete original, and readers should know which they are quoting.

The doubled trigrams, hexagrams 1, 2, 29, 30, 51 and 52, are the six figures made of one trigram repeated, and they are given a special weight throughout the commentarial tradition for that reason. In each case the figure is taken to show its trigram's nature undiluted, which for water means danger with nothing to offset it.

The practical reading of hexagram 29 turns on the doubling. This is not one danger; it is the same danger arriving again, and the hexagram's counsel is shaped by that.

The received advice is to remain sincere, to keep the heart constant, and to move as water moves, filling each hollow before flowing on, never skipping a stage, never forcing a passage. The Image in the Ten Wings tells the superior person to keep their virtue constant and to practise the business of teaching, so that steadiness becomes habitual before it is needed. That is an argument about preparation rather than about response, and it is one of the more useful things the commentary contributes.

In practice the figure is read for a period of recurring difficulty in which the querent's situation is genuinely constrained. The characteristic error is trying to leap the obstacle. The characteristic correct action is filling the hole: doing the whole of the tedious thing in front of them before attempting to move.

The fourth line is the one most often quoted in reading, and it is oddly domestic: a jug of wine, a bowl of rice, earthenware vessels handed in simply through the window. Wilhelm reads it as an offering made without ceremony because ceremony is not possible. Whatever it originally recorded, it reads as a description of what people actually do for each other in a bad stretch, and it is the warmest passage in an otherwise bleak hexagram. Whether that warmth was intended or is something readers have supplied is exactly the kind of question this text does not answer.