Work on the Decayed

The eighteenth hexagram, Gu ("Work on What Has Been Spoiled" or Decay), places Gen (Mountain) above Xun (Wind). Wind stilled at the foot of the mountain, no longer able to move freely, gives the image of stagnation in which decay sets in and calls for repair. It follows Following in the King Wen sequence.

Gu stands 39th of 64 in the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary ordering devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and ascribed to Fu Xi, distinct from its eighteenth place in the King Wen sequence traced above. This was the arrangement Joachim Bouvet, a Jesuit in Beijing, sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1701, letting Leibniz read its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of Work on the Decayed run yin, yang, yang, yin, yin, 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 Zhen over Dui, forming hexagram 54, The Marrying Maiden (Gui Mei), 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. Work on the Decayed's King Wen partner is hexagram 17, Following (Sui); 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, promises supreme success and favors even crossing the great water, provided one attends carefully to what came before the task and what must follow it, for corruption inherited from the past can be reversed by patient effort. The Image speaks of stirring up the people and strengthening their spirit. The core theme is the repair of decay and the setting right of what has been neglected. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

The core judgment behind Gu belongs to the Zhou Yi, a Western Zhou divination record that Edward Shaughnessy and other scholars now place around the late ninth century BCE, centuries before the Ten Wings commentary layered onto it added the Image and the language of the superior person quoted above. Wang Bi's influential third-century commentary, part of the received Zhouyi zhu, read the resulting text as philosophy rather than as a network of trigram correlations, a stance that shaped how it has been transmitted ever since. In the King Wen sequence, Work on the Decayed (Gu), hexagram 18, is paired with its inversion: Following (Sui), hexagram 17. 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 reads the same lines closer to a historical record than a philosophical one.