The Clinging

Hexagram 30 is the doubled fire trigram, and its name Li is among the most contested single words in the book.

Wilhelm gives The Clinging, and builds the hexagram around fire's dependence on what it burns, brightness that has no substance of its own and must attach itself to something. That reading is coherent, influential, and the reason the hexagram arrives in English as a lesson about dependence and illumination.

The character has other established senses. It can mean to be caught in a net, and it is also used for a bird, in some readings an oriole. Translators working from the Bronze Age stratum have taken the hexagram as being about netting or snaring, which sits interestingly beside hexagram 29's pits: two consecutive figures about traps. Legge notes the difficulty. Rutt's 1996 version takes the concrete route.

The line texts do not decisively settle it. They include footprints running crisscross, the setting sun, an old person beating a pot and singing, a fire that flames up and dies and is thrown away, tears and lamentation, and a king marching out and taking prisoners. That is a mixture of the domestic, the martial and the elegiac, and it can be made to support several readings.

What is not in doubt is the figure's structural role. As the doubled fire trigram it closes the first half of the King Wen sequence, opposite the doubled water of hexagram 29, and the pairing of fire and water at that hinge is clearly deliberate. Whatever the King Wen sequence is, whoever assembled it put the two doubled elemental figures at its midpoint on purpose.

Taken in the received sense, hexagram 30 describes clarity, visibility and intelligence, and insists that all three are contingent.

That contingency is the reading's whole point. Fire is real while it has fuel. A person's brilliance, position or reputation is likewise sustained by something outside itself, and the hexagram's counsel is to attend to what is doing the sustaining rather than to the flame. Wilhelm's judgement advises care of the cow, an image usually read as the patient maintenance of what feeds the light.

In practice the figure reads for visibility and for attachment at once. It turns up for situations in which the querent is being seen, publicity, recognition, exposure, and the useful question it puts is what that visibility is resting on.

The second half of the reading is less comfortable. The third line has the sun setting, with an old person either singing or lamenting, and the alternatives are not consoling: without accepting the turn, one laments. The fourth line flares and is discarded. Fire in this hexagram is not a steady lamp; it is something that burns through its material and stops.

Both Wilhelm and Legge preserve that arc. Where they differ is in how much philosophical weight they put on it, and Wilhelm, reading through the later commentators, gets considerably more doctrine out of the figure than the line texts alone would yield. That is not a criticism of him so much as a description of what his translation is: a rendering of the I Ching as the later Chinese tradition understood it, which is a legitimate and valuable thing to have produced.