The fifty-seventh hexagram, Xun ("The Gentle" or the Penetrating), is one of the eight doubled hexagrams, formed of the trigram Xun (Wind, also Wood) above and below. Wind following upon wind, penetrating everywhere by persistence, gives the image of a mild but ceaseless influence. It stands fifty-seventh in the King Wen sequence.
Xun 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: 37th of 64, apart from its fifty-seventh place in the King Wen sequence above, and distinct again from the trigram Xun's own place in the eight-trigram form of the same xiantian circle. 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 The Gentle run yin, yang, yang, yin, yang, 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 Li over Dui, forming hexagram 38, Opposition (Kui), 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. The Gentle's King Wen partner is hexagram 58, The Joyous (Dui); 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.