Why ten years?
Years, in the Yijing, usually come in threes. I’ve counted seven mentions of ‘three years’, most of them indicating a long period when something doesn’t happen:
- 13.3 three years without rising up
- 29.6 three years without gain
- 47.1 and 55.6, three years without meeting anyone
- 53.5 three years without pregnancy
- 63.3 and 64.4 three years until victory
Sometimes, good things are promised after the three years are over; sometimes not. In all these lines, though, ‘three years’ seems to be a way of saying ‘a long time’.
There are just three lines that refer to a period of ten years:
‘Now sprouting, now hesitating.
Now driving a team of horses.
Not robbers at all, but marital allies.
The child-woman’s constancy – no children.
Ten years go by, then there are children.’
Hexagram 3, line 2‘Confused return, pitfall. There is calamity and blunder.
Using this to mobilise the armies: in the end there is great defeat.
For your state’s leader, disaster.
For ten years, incapable of marching out.’
Hexagram 24, line 6
‘Rejecting nourishment.
Constancy, pitfall.
For ten years, don’t act.
No direction bears fruit.’
Hexagram 27, line 3Is this a reference to the Chinese calendar? That counts in tens and twelves, and it is very ancient. Wilhelm observes that ten years makes ‘a complete cycle’. (Strictly speaking, sixty years would make a complete cycle, but ten years would take us round a cycle of Heavenly Stems.) However… while the Ten Heavenly Stems certainly predate the Yi, they were originally used to count days, marking the day on which to honour the ancestor they named. Wikipedia says that while the sexagenary calendar was measuring days from Shang times, the first records of its use for years are in the Mawangdui manuscripts – from the tomb sealed in 168BC. So if ‘ten years’ meant a complete cycle of time for the authors of the Yijing, then it only just did.
3.2 to 60
‘Now sprouting, now hesitating.
Now driving a team of horses.
Not robbers at all, but marital allies.
The child-woman’s constancy – no children.
Ten years go by, then there are children.’
Here, Sprouting means hesitating. That is, advancing but with difficulty and detours, maybe going round in circles. The line goes on to show us what sprouting-hesitancy looks like: a mock-abduction of the bride, perhaps to disguise the poverty of the groom, and a ten year delay until there are children.
I think it was from Wu Jing Nuan that I first got the idea that the ‘child woman’ meant a girl betrothed as a child, before puberty – which would explain the ten year wait for children. Geoffrey Redmond also thinks this a possibility. However, I haven’t found any suggestion that child betrothal was a widespread Chinese tradition, and a 女子, nuzi, might just be a young woman, like a 君子, a junzi, is a young noble.
So… perhaps this is just a matter of waiting for the girl to grow up, or perhaps it’s an unexplained ten year delay until the marriage is blessed with children. A childless marriage was a calamity, so a ten year delay would be deeply worrying.
We’re at the very beginning of the book, in the first hexagram that mingles solid and broken lines – the first encounter of male and female – and the second line is just reaching out for the first time in search of connection in the outer world. Everything is very new, and very hesitant. However, these are not really robbers, and the girl is not really childless. The hesitancy is just a time to find the Measure of it all.
That is, this line is changing to Hexagram 60, Measuring. In this marriage, old boundaries between clans will be Dispersed (Hexagram 59) and new ones grown, in the spirit of Measuring. (The name of Hexagram 60 originally refers to the segments of bamboo: organic divisions, naturally growing to their right size.)
What do these ten years mean? Perhaps just a very long time. Marriage expands your horizons, and so too does thinking so far into the future. It can be a matter of broadening your mental scope, thinking longer term, and hence getting a better perspective on the present.
24.6 to 27
‘Confused return, pitfall. There is calamity and blunder.
Using this to mobilise the armies: in the end there is great defeat.
For your state’s leader, disaster.
For ten years, incapable of marching out.’
24.6 is not an easy one to rationalise away in readings. It’s by some margin the most catastrophic line in the book: calamity, blunder, defeat and disaster, and ten years’ incapacity.
Hexagram 24 is Returning, but its sixth line is utterly remote from the ‘returning light’ of the single yang line in the first place, and hence from any clarity of purpose. It’s motivated by its relating hexagram, 27, Nourishment – that is, by sheer hunger (whether need or greed). As Tuck Chang points out, this goes against the wisdom of the Image, when the ancient kings closed the borders so that merchants and princes could not travel.
In readings, this line often describes an attempt to recapture something that’s no longer attainable – maybe something stripped away with the supports in the paired line, 23.1:
‘Stripping away the bed, by way of its supports.
To disregard constancy: pitfall.’
There may be entrancing fantasies of return and recovery – but not everything lost can be restored, and sometimes you need an inward connection, not something ‘out there’ to meet your needs. The calamities of the line might be avoided if you can avoid running after the fantasy, and instead allow what’s past to be past, and what’s new to arise.
The ‘ten years’ in this line are quite different from those in 3.2 – the difference between ‘after ten years, then it happens,’ and ‘for ten years, it doesn’t happen.’ This comes with no promise that all will be well after the ten years are up. They just represent a very, very long time – so much longer than the ‘seven days’ of the Oracle – the longest time mentioned in the book, and maybe the longest time you can imagine.
27.3 to 22
‘Rejecting nourishment.
Constancy, pitfall.
For ten years, don’t act.
No direction bears fruit.’
The word translated ‘rejecting’, fu 拂, originally means brushing or shaking something off – a defiant, dismissive gesture. My experience of this line agrees with Bradford Hatcher’s interpretation, that it’s something like breatharianism: rejecting what you need to live. ‘No, no, don’t worry about me,’ says the ageing parent. ‘Move as far away as you like, I don’t want to be a nuisance.’ ‘My work is spiritual,’ insists the practitioner, ‘so I don’t participate in those lower-vibration commercial marketing practices. Also, since I have so few clients, what can I live on?’
Hexagram 22 as relating hexagram suggests that this rejection may have something to do with self-image. But as so often with these ‘negative’ lines, this is not necessarily the action of a bad or selfish person – just someone in denial.
The meaning of ‘ten years’ here rather depends on how you translate the negative that follows it. This character is said to mean ‘do not!’ rather than just ‘not’, but not everyone translates it that way. Wilhelm translates, ‘Do not act thus for ten years,’ meaning – he explains – that one should never do so, and Rutt says ‘Avoid use for ten years.’ But Lynn has, ‘He will have no employment for ten years,’ Deng Ming Dao, ‘For ten years all will be useless and no place will bring gain,’ while Bradford contributes the dryer-than-dust, ‘For ten years not to be functional is not a direction with merit.’
So this is either a strategy not to use for ten years (or never), or else one that renders you useless for ten years (or forever). That’ll probably be a distinction without a difference for most readings: pushing away nourishment is fundamentally not a useful idea. Starting from here will go nowhere. ‘Ten years’ seems to be simply emphasis: no, not a good idea; no, it won’t work tomorrow, either.
Counting?
Looking at the three mentions of seven days, I found some maybe-interesting patterns by counting along the Sequence of hexagrams. Could I find any for ten years?
Well… I’ve tried counting hexagrams (from 3 to 12), lines (from 3.2 to 4.6), and even pairs of hexagrams (from 3/4 to 21/22) (for no particular reason except that if you can count hexagrams as days, perhaps there should be something bigger you can count as years). To be honest, nothing really jumped out at me – though counting hexagrams showed some faint promise.
Ten hexagrams along from 3.2 (counting inclusively, as always), we might hope to find babies. What we actually find is Hexagram 12, Blocked, which looks at first glance like a dead end. However, 12.2 includes the word bao 包, ’embracing’ – a character that shows the child in the womb. The same word’s in 12.3, and a component of ‘bushy’ in 12.5, and all three feature in a nice little Yijing Easter egg with their zhi gua.
Ten hexagram-years after the military disaster of 24.6, we are still in Retreat – Hexagram 33.
And ten hexagram-years after 27.3, we’re still ‘unemployed’, as Lynn translates the line, in Hexagram 36, Brightness Hiding.
If you are not quite convinced by these – no, nor am I. But then, for two of these three cases, the idea isn’t that ten years marks the end of a cycle and the beginning of something new, so perhaps we shouldn’t be looking for anything very spectacular.
Conclusions?
‘Seven days’ has quite a clear meaning: the length of time for the wheel to turn so we can start over. ‘Ten years’ is not so elegant: it seems just to mean a really, really long time.
I began this article by comparing the three instances of ‘ten years’ with the general expression ‘three years’, meaning… ‘a long time’. So the distinction may seem a bit of an anti-climax. Still… compare the three year wait for conception in 53.5,
‘The wild geese gradually progress to the ancestral grave-mounds.
The wife is not pregnant for three years.
In the end, nothing can prevent it.
Good fortune.’
with the ten years of 3.2:
‘Now sprouting, now hesitating.
Now driving a team of horses.
Not robbers at all, but marital allies.
The child-woman’s constancy – no children.
Ten years go by, then there are children.’
A three year delay is serious, but you can still experience and understand it as ‘gradual progress’, slow but unstoppable. A ten year delay turns sprouting to hesitating: diversion, delay, turning in circles. (Looking at this line in the light of the other two ten year intervals might give us pause.)
And compare 13.3,
‘Hiding away arms in the thickets,
Climbing your high mound.
For three years, not starting anything.’
with 24.6:
‘Confused return, pitfall. There is calamity and blunder.
Using this to mobilise the armies: in the end there is great defeat.
For your state’s leader, disaster.
For ten years, incapable of marching out.’
We could stow our weapons and disengage for a while to reconnoitre, creating a pause of three years – how different from the unmitigated disaster that is 24.6! There’s a clear emotional difference between three years and ten.