Treading

The tenth hexagram, Lu ("Treading" or Conduct), places Qian (Heaven) above Dui (Lake). The joyous lake beneath the strong heaven gives the classic image of treading carefully, even upon the tail of a tiger. It follows The Taming Power of the Small in the King Wen sequence.

In the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary order devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi, Lu stands ninth of 64, distinct from its tenth position in the King Wen sequence traced above; this was the arrangement the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet sent from Beijing in 1701 to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who read its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of Treading run yang, yang, yin, yang, 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 Xun over Li, forming hexagram 37, The Family (Jia Ren), 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. Treading's King Wen partner is hexagram 9, Small Taming (Xiao Xu); 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, holds that one may tread on the tail of the tiger and it does not bite, for correct and courteous conduct carries one safely through danger, and there is success. The Image distinguishes high and low and settles the aims of the people, an ordering of proper stations. The core theme is right conduct and careful advance through peril. Lines received as moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that adjusts the reading.

The Judgment and Image paraphrased above draw on two of the Ten Wings, commentarial texts appended to the Yijing and traditionally credited to Confucius, though the attribution was already doubted within the Chinese tradition by the eleventh century and modern scholarship instead dates their composition to roughly the fourth to second century BCE, well after the Zhou Yi core itself. Wang Bi's third-century commentary read passages like this one from Lu philosophically, playing down the trigram image-correlations earlier commentators relied on, while Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi pushed back the other way, insisting the book remain readable as the divination manual it began as. In the King Wen sequence, Treading (Lu), hexagram 10, is paired with its inversion, the figure formed by turning it upside down: Small Taming (Xiao Xu), hexagram 9. Translations of the Judgment above vary by tradition: Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German rendering, carried into English by Cary Baynes for the 1950 Bollingen edition, gives the text a mystical, aphoristic cast that shaped most twentieth-century readers' sense of the book, while James Legge's earlier and more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East series reads the same lines closer to a historical record than a philosophical one.