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Losses
This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Differentiating hexagrams
This is another post about the differences between hexagrams: this time, Hexagrams 23, Stripping Away, and 41, Decreasing. Both are about loss, about ending up with less, and – given human nature – we tend not to be pleased to receive either one. But how are they different?
Looking up the hexagram names in the dictionary, there seems to be a great deal of overlap in meaning.
Bo, ‘stripping away’, literally means peeling off the skin: the ancient character contains a ‘knife’ element, to cut with. (I’ve seen the hexagram representing surgery to remove something.) The dictionary meanings include flaying, peeling, falling off and dropping away, and also injuring and excoriating in the more abstract sense of brutal criticism.
Sun at its simplest just means ‘decrease’, but by extension this comes to mean harm, destruction, weakening, and also biting, mocking criticism. The ancient character shows a round vessel and a hand, which in the context of the hexagram always makes me think of emptying out and making space.
But in the dictionary, these two aren’t all that different: two kinds of destruction, two kinds of criticism. One distinction that could be helpful, I think, is that bo strips away the surface, while sun reduces the substance. This all becomes much clearer when you look at the hexagrams themselves –
If you remember that the energy and story always travels from the bottom line to the top, then you can see at once how Hexagram 23 is a snapshot of a ‘peeling’ process, with the topmost solid line the last one to go. (Or we might imitate Adam Schwartz, take inspiration from line 5, and see the hexagram picture as the skeleton of a filleted fish, ready for its final ‘stripping away’ in the stock pot.)
For Hexagram 41, Wilhelm’s explanation of the tradition is invaluable. We should think of this hexagram as a development of Hexagram 11, he explains, in which lines 3 and 6 have changed places:
I don’t in the least agree that ‘trickle upward’ is the hexagram’s entire theme, but it does help to see that third line reaching upward, like the mists from the lake drifting up the mountainside.
Big differences here –
One is blunt and direct, one is gently reassuring. And they have exactly opposite things to say about ‘having a direction to go.’
Hexagram 23, for me, carries the message that this is being taken from you. To have a direction to go is to have a direction of travel, to follow your intentions or just your curiosity and see where it leads you. Stripping Away is no time to set out to attain or explore anything. ‘I wonder if I tried it this way instead…?’ – nope. Still not happening.
When I’m introducing Hexagram 23 to someone, I often talk about falling leaves, and how you don’t run round searching for ways to reattach them to the trees. I just learned that those beautiful red-orange-yellow autumn pigments were always present in the leaf; it’s only that the active chlorophyll that masked them is lost as the leaf dies. An outer surface with no more inner life will always fall away.
It’s harder to find an analogy in nature for Hexagram 41, because this is about making an offering: a human, purposeful act. (Maybe the maintenance of acid-base homeostasis in the blood by decreasing calcium stores in the bones?) Made with truth and confidence, this brings good fortune and is – despite how it feels – no mistake at all. Something is offered up from below for the sake of what is above. It’s fruitful – vital, I think – to have a direction for this, to know why you are doing it.
The Tuanzhuan, commentary on the oracle, captures the difference.
For Hexagram 41, in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation:
And for Hexagram 23, from Bradford Hatcher:
The two commentaries share the message of timeliness, but Hexagram 41 implies there is a time to decrease the firm, to make your offering, while Hexagram 23 simply witnesses and respects the timing of heaven. The message of the trigrams is, ‘Accept and stop here.’
So Decreasing offers something up for the sake of something higher, but it seems Stripping Away just happens to you, with no ‘for the sake of’ about it. However… the Image, telling stories with the trigram pictures, finds something different. Both are about human responses to loss:
For Decrease, it helps to put a mountain-sized lid on your resentments and desires.
Or as Wilhelm translates,
Either way, you can see there’s an emergent sense of purpose in the Image of 23: a deliberate ‘trickle down’ effect, for Wilhelm. But the text here is somewhat depersonalised: it refers literally to ‘above’ and ‘below’, unlike every other Image text, which name individuals: noble ones, princes or ancient kings. This is a power relationship, of course, but to me it also looks like a process of erosion, from the mountain into the valley – a lot like leaf fall, returning organic matter to the ground, creating healthy soil for the spring growth to come.
There’s purpose here, but something beyond human purposes. The wheel of the year is turning; the old falls away for the sake of new growth to come, and this has not much to do with your chosen ‘direction to go’. But the Image invites you to see the purpose at work, and maybe join with it. What might this loss nourish and sustain in future? If you could experience your loss as something more like erosion into the fields, or more like donation than taxation, how would that be different?
(Just a couple, not all six. Two simple baskets!)
Isn’t it interesting that neither of these third lines is ill-omened? After all, the third line of a hexagram is often a perilous place. It’s on the cusp of stepping across the threshold from the inner to outer trigram, from the inner world of theory to the outer world of practice. And so it can have a sense of striving, pushing at the barrier – eager for commitment and ready to put its ideas to the test. Sometimes it hesitates or struggles; sometimes it can lack grounding and be overconfident. On a human scale, it seems to me like a teenager.
So why, in a time of Stripping Away, is that not a mistake? I wonder if it might be the idealism of line 3: melding with and embodying the pure spirit of the hexagram, ready to let it all fall away. (In this it’s quite similar to the third line of Hexagram 59, Dispersing: ‘Dispersing your self without regrets.’) Hence it will be still – this moving line changes the inner trigram to mountain and the hexagram as a whole to 52, Stilling – and not try to make things happen. No mistake: no loss of connection to the quality of the time.
Hexagram 41, line three, leads to separating from the crowd. Remember the traditional analysis of the hexagram, how 11’s line 3 has moved up to the 6th place, decreasing the lower trigram for the sake of the upper. So this line, where the mists rise from the surface of the inner lake, embodies the hexagram’s knowledge about having/being less and looking upward. Drawn onward by its relationship with line 6 (I think of something like this), and perhaps by that teenaged idealism and inner independence, it will walk away from security in numbers.
Fourth lines, newly emerged into the outer world, tend to ask, ‘What can I do here?’ which is exactly the wrong question to be asking in a time of Stripping Away. ‘Oh, is this a time for cutting away the surface? Here, how can I contribute to that?’ Prompted by the eager, ‘seize the day’ attitude of Hexagram 35, this line takes up the knife, to disastrous effect.
But when Decreasing asks, ‘What can I do here?’ there is a ready answer: act to decrease suffering. 23.4 inflicts wounds, but 41.4 heals. It’s actually not necessarily ‘your’ affliction, but a general possessive: your/their/its – perhaps whatever pain belongs to the situation, which might have something to do with its ‘step of change’ hexagram, 38, Opposing, and alienation.
‘What can I do?’ As always in Hexagram 41, give something up, let something go – in this instance, anxiety, and perhaps also the sense that this is a Great Divide / Existential Crisis. The action called for here is generally much smaller and simpler than agonising over it. The message to be sent, or action to be taken, varies: it seems to be whatever small thing will create a shift. (‘Small works, good fortune,’ says the Oracle of 38).
I’ve been browsing through years of 23 and 41 in my own journal, always asking myself what the ‘direction to go’ might be in each reading.
With Hexagram 41, I always had less of something: time, or sugar, or freedom, or control, or a parcel that got lost in the post. And I always needed to find the reason why. Often I was making the sacrifice consciously, and just needed to remember what it was for. (Stop eating sugar for the sake of your teeth!) Sometimes the loss wasn’t one I would have chosen, but there was still a reason for it. If I could find my direction to go, then the whole experience of loss would be transformed. Also, typically, it’s not half as bad as I’d imagined. Those “two simple baskets” often have a subtext for me of “and you can stop overdramatizing now”.
With hexagram 23, my own purposes have nothing to do with anything and are best forgotten. Typically, the matter is out of my hands, and I need to “accept and stop here,” as the commentary says. But sometimes, especially when lines higher in the hexagram are changing, there’s also a sense that I need a complete change. Peeling and stripping away will create a tabula rasa, a true, fresh start for something new to grow. ‘Heaven’s behaviour’, not my ideas.
So I think that both hexagrams can contain promise. The core distinction is that Hexagram 41 means giving things up for the sake of your higher intention, while 23 means losing things such that your own intentions cannot be realised, and the promise of new growth comes only through that blank slate.
A couple of imaginary readings, for comparison.
‘Where’s this relationship going?’ If it’s stripping away, I should think that’s the end. If it’s decreasing, then I wonder whether there might be sacrifices to make for the sake of the relationship – or whether the relationship itself might occupy less time and energy for the sake of some other, higher purpose.
‘How to make progress with a project?’ Hexagram 41 would tell me to simplify it: downsize, invest less, focus on quality not quantity. Hexagram 23, I think, would ask me to consider seriously what had reached its natural end, what I was keeping up out of some kind of ‘sunk costs’ fallacy, and what could be cleared out of the way to allow something completely new to grow.
This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Differentiating hexagrams
This is another post about the differences between hexagrams: this time, Hexagrams 23, Stripping Away, and 41, Decreasing. Both are about loss, about ending up with less, and – given human nature – we tend not to be pleased to receive either one. But how are they different?
Names and shapes
Looking up the hexagram names in the dictionary, there seems to be a great deal of overlap in meaning.
Bo, ‘stripping away’, literally means peeling off the skin: the ancient character contains a ‘knife’ element, to cut with. (I’ve seen the hexagram representing surgery to remove something.) The dictionary meanings include flaying, peeling, falling off and dropping away, and also injuring and excoriating in the more abstract sense of brutal criticism.
Sun at its simplest just means ‘decrease’, but by extension this comes to mean harm, destruction, weakening, and also biting, mocking criticism. The ancient character shows a round vessel and a hand, which in the context of the hexagram always makes me think of emptying out and making space.
But in the dictionary, these two aren’t all that different: two kinds of destruction, two kinds of criticism. One distinction that could be helpful, I think, is that bo strips away the surface, while sun reduces the substance. This all becomes much clearer when you look at the hexagrams themselves –
If you remember that the energy and story always travels from the bottom line to the top, then you can see at once how Hexagram 23 is a snapshot of a ‘peeling’ process, with the topmost solid line the last one to go. (Or we might imitate Adam Schwartz, take inspiration from line 5, and see the hexagram picture as the skeleton of a filleted fish, ready for its final ‘stripping away’ in the stock pot.)
For Hexagram 41, Wilhelm’s explanation of the tradition is invaluable. We should think of this hexagram as a development of Hexagram 11, he explains, in which lines 3 and 6 have changed places:
I don’t in the least agree that ‘trickle upward’ is the hexagram’s entire theme, but it does help to see that third line reaching upward, like the mists from the lake drifting up the mountainside.
Oracles
Big differences here –
One is blunt and direct, one is gently reassuring. And they have exactly opposite things to say about ‘having a direction to go.’
Hexagram 23, for me, carries the message that this is being taken from you. To have a direction to go is to have a direction of travel, to follow your intentions or just your curiosity and see where it leads you. Stripping Away is no time to set out to attain or explore anything. ‘I wonder if I tried it this way instead…?’ – nope. Still not happening.
When I’m introducing Hexagram 23 to someone, I often talk about falling leaves, and how you don’t run round searching for ways to reattach them to the trees. I just learned that those beautiful red-orange-yellow autumn pigments were always present in the leaf; it’s only that the active chlorophyll that masked them is lost as the leaf dies. An outer surface with no more inner life will always fall away.
It’s harder to find an analogy in nature for Hexagram 41, because this is about making an offering: a human, purposeful act. (Maybe the maintenance of acid-base homeostasis in the blood by decreasing calcium stores in the bones?) Made with truth and confidence, this brings good fortune and is – despite how it feels – no mistake at all. Something is offered up from below for the sake of what is above. It’s fruitful – vital, I think – to have a direction for this, to know why you are doing it.
The Tuanzhuan, commentary on the oracle, captures the difference.
For Hexagram 41, in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation:
And for Hexagram 23, from Bradford Hatcher:
The two commentaries share the message of timeliness, but Hexagram 41 implies there is a time to decrease the firm, to make your offering, while Hexagram 23 simply witnesses and respects the timing of heaven. The message of the trigrams is, ‘Accept and stop here.’
Images
So Decreasing offers something up for the sake of something higher, but it seems Stripping Away just happens to you, with no ‘for the sake of’ about it. However… the Image, telling stories with the trigram pictures, finds something different. Both are about human responses to loss:
For Decrease, it helps to put a mountain-sized lid on your resentments and desires.
Or as Wilhelm translates,
Either way, you can see there’s an emergent sense of purpose in the Image of 23: a deliberate ‘trickle down’ effect, for Wilhelm. But the text here is somewhat depersonalised: it refers literally to ‘above’ and ‘below’, unlike every other Image text, which name individuals: noble ones, princes or ancient kings. This is a power relationship, of course, but to me it also looks like a process of erosion, from the mountain into the valley – a lot like leaf fall, returning organic matter to the ground, creating healthy soil for the spring growth to come.
There’s purpose here, but something beyond human purposes. The wheel of the year is turning; the old falls away for the sake of new growth to come, and this has not much to do with your chosen ‘direction to go’. But the Image invites you to see the purpose at work, and maybe join with it. What might this loss nourish and sustain in future? If you could experience your loss as something more like erosion into the fields, or more like donation than taxation, how would that be different?
A couple of line texts
(Just a couple, not all six. Two simple baskets!)
Lines 3
Isn’t it interesting that neither of these third lines is ill-omened? After all, the third line of a hexagram is often a perilous place. It’s on the cusp of stepping across the threshold from the inner to outer trigram, from the inner world of theory to the outer world of practice. And so it can have a sense of striving, pushing at the barrier – eager for commitment and ready to put its ideas to the test. Sometimes it hesitates or struggles; sometimes it can lack grounding and be overconfident. On a human scale, it seems to me like a teenager.
So why, in a time of Stripping Away, is that not a mistake? I wonder if it might be the idealism of line 3: melding with and embodying the pure spirit of the hexagram, ready to let it all fall away. (In this it’s quite similar to the third line of Hexagram 59, Dispersing: ‘Dispersing your self without regrets.’) Hence it will be still – this moving line changes the inner trigram to mountain and the hexagram as a whole to 52, Stilling – and not try to make things happen. No mistake: no loss of connection to the quality of the time.
Hexagram 41, line three, leads to separating from the crowd. Remember the traditional analysis of the hexagram, how 11’s line 3 has moved up to the 6th place, decreasing the lower trigram for the sake of the upper. So this line, where the mists rise from the surface of the inner lake, embodies the hexagram’s knowledge about having/being less and looking upward. Drawn onward by its relationship with line 6 (I think of something like this), and perhaps by that teenaged idealism and inner independence, it will walk away from security in numbers.
Lines 4
Fourth lines, newly emerged into the outer world, tend to ask, ‘What can I do here?’ which is exactly the wrong question to be asking in a time of Stripping Away. ‘Oh, is this a time for cutting away the surface? Here, how can I contribute to that?’ Prompted by the eager, ‘seize the day’ attitude of Hexagram 35, this line takes up the knife, to disastrous effect.
But when Decreasing asks, ‘What can I do here?’ there is a ready answer: act to decrease suffering. 23.4 inflicts wounds, but 41.4 heals. It’s actually not necessarily ‘your’ affliction, but a general possessive: your/their/its – perhaps whatever pain belongs to the situation, which might have something to do with its ‘step of change’ hexagram, 38, Opposing, and alienation.
‘What can I do?’ As always in Hexagram 41, give something up, let something go – in this instance, anxiety, and perhaps also the sense that this is a Great Divide / Existential Crisis. The action called for here is generally much smaller and simpler than agonising over it. The message to be sent, or action to be taken, varies: it seems to be whatever small thing will create a shift. (‘Small works, good fortune,’ says the Oracle of 38).
In readings…?
I’ve been browsing through years of 23 and 41 in my own journal, always asking myself what the ‘direction to go’ might be in each reading.
With Hexagram 41, I always had less of something: time, or sugar, or freedom, or control, or a parcel that got lost in the post. And I always needed to find the reason why. Often I was making the sacrifice consciously, and just needed to remember what it was for. (Stop eating sugar for the sake of your teeth!) Sometimes the loss wasn’t one I would have chosen, but there was still a reason for it. If I could find my direction to go, then the whole experience of loss would be transformed. Also, typically, it’s not half as bad as I’d imagined. Those “two simple baskets” often have a subtext for me of “and you can stop overdramatizing now”.
With hexagram 23, my own purposes have nothing to do with anything and are best forgotten. Typically, the matter is out of my hands, and I need to “accept and stop here,” as the commentary says. But sometimes, especially when lines higher in the hexagram are changing, there’s also a sense that I need a complete change. Peeling and stripping away will create a tabula rasa, a true, fresh start for something new to grow. ‘Heaven’s behaviour’, not my ideas.
So I think that both hexagrams can contain promise. The core distinction is that Hexagram 41 means giving things up for the sake of your higher intention, while 23 means losing things such that your own intentions cannot be realised, and the promise of new growth comes only through that blank slate.
Imaginary readings
A couple of imaginary readings, for comparison.
‘Where’s this relationship going?’ If it’s stripping away, I should think that’s the end. If it’s decreasing, then I wonder whether there might be sacrifices to make for the sake of the relationship – or whether the relationship itself might occupy less time and energy for the sake of some other, higher purpose.
‘How to make progress with a project?’ Hexagram 41 would tell me to simplify it: downsize, invest less, focus on quality not quantity. Hexagram 23, I think, would ask me to consider seriously what had reached its natural end, what I was keeping up out of some kind of ‘sunk costs’ fallacy, and what could be cleared out of the way to allow something completely new to grow.