27. Yí 頤
NOURISHMENT, CORNERS OF THE MOUTH, JAWS
NOURISHMENT, CORNERS OF THE MOUTH, JAWS
Accumulate knowledge and digest it through real experience, test the usefulness of information.
Accumulate knowledge and digest it through real experience, test the usefulness of information.
Hexagram Structure
The key to this sign is how the roles are divided between its halves. The activity sits below, in the inner trigram of Thunder; the outer one, Mountain, stands still. Read practically, that is hard news: no help will come from outside. Whatever the outer world could do for you it already did at the previous stage — what fills the mouth is now won by one's own labor, and the aphorism suggests looking closely at exactly how that happens.
Steadiness in such self-provision promises good fortune. There is a second condition as well: development belongs only to whoever soberly recognizes the risk and the fear built into the getting of food — carefreeness is not provided for here.
In terms of knowing, the source reads the sign as the relation between accumulated knowledge and fresh living experience: the first feeds you, but taking it in stays personal work, and nobody will do it in your place. The story grows out of the summit of the previous hexagram — from the height of being taught by the great, it is precisely this road that opens.
How It Works in Practice
The first warning of the source concerns the mouth in both of its occupations: you talk too much and you eat too much. Both are working against you now. Be especially careful with gossip — talk about others strikes not only them but you as well, and you more surely and more painfully.
The second concerns tone. It is time to stop complaining about fate: complaints eat up time and strength and change absolutely nothing in the state of affairs. All the more so since change is already close, and it is better to meet it composed than aggrieved. Readiness is more useful right now than grievances.
Your wish will come true, but not in the shape you drew for yourself. This is not a trick but an ordinary property of the period: the result will arrive by another route and in another wrapping, so do not throw it away simply because you did not recognize it at once as yours.
Your health is worth attending to without drama but also without postponement: seeing a doctor will not be out of place, even if you see no obvious cause for alarm.
The concluding advice of the sign is a sober audit of your own words and appetites. Count what you say and what you consume the way one counts a month's expenses. Moderation here is not asceticism but a way of getting the controls back.
Traditional Description
At the top is the trigram Gen (Mountain), below is the trigram Zhen (Thunder). The metaphorical image of this hexagram is the movement of the jaws: the upper jaw is stationary during eating, while the lower jaw moves. To better interpret this hexagram, it is necessary to pay attention to its constituent trigrams. The upper trigram – Gen (Mountain) – represents the quality of steadfastness, immobility. The lower trigram Zhen (Thunder), which is metaphorically expressed in lightning, represents, on the contrary, full mobility. Thus, something immobile is on top and something moving, acting is below.
Nourishment implies the accumulation of strength, however, nourishment in an allegorical sense is education, acquiring new knowledge and experience. Even the wisest person does not stop learning and never thinks that they have learned everything or have nowhere to develop further. This is the key to wisdom. However, any learning is like ‘chewing’ someone else’s knowledge, that is, developing one’s own understanding. There is no point in learning if you simply swallow other people’s ideas or concepts and then present them as your own thoughts without understanding their meaning and applying them to your own experience and life. They say that if you want to live well next year – plant rice, if you want to live well all your life – educate children and give them the best knowledge.
An alternative understanding of this hexagram is a situation when we must carefully weigh what, to whom, and in what situation we speak. If the situation has endowed us with strength, power, and opportunities that exceed our usual possibilities, we should more carefully analyze both what we say (the weight or strength of our word increases) and the information we are ‘fed’, whether it is useful for us and for further advancement forward or whether it is empty and will not bring us the necessary ‘nourishment’.nnnnn
I Ching Talking
Heaven and Earth nourish all beings, the wise ruler nourishes the gifted and thereby reaches many people
Hexagram Line Descriptions
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The top line completes the story: the feeding is over and the exit from it begins. What has been gathered inside finally allows what was forbidden to all the lower steps — large activity, the crossing of the great river. The moment of transition is itself dangerous, and the source does not hide that, but here danger is combined with good fortune for the first time: the risk has been paid for with reserves. The situation of self-provision releases a person once they have fed a strength in themselves fit for work of another scale.
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The fifth position is the place of the great person, but a weak force occupies it, and in that lies the whole drama of the step. It will not stretch to wide expansion; helping others, leading them, undertaking crossings of the great water are impossible now. The deviation from the foundation has already happened and cannot be corrected — it can only be lived through correctly. The prescription of the source: passive endurance and the keeping of one's rightness. With that kind of steadiness good fortune is promised; with an attempt at scope, it is not.
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The fourth line repeats the turn of the second but with the opposite outcome: now looking for support below is the right move. The usual road upward gives nothing, while turning to the first, strong line feeds. A tiger stands over the situation meanwhile — the fixed, unblinking gaze of a threat from above, ready to spring after you. Getting away from it succeeds precisely by looking down, toward the source of support. The road is unusual but sound, and there will be no censure for taking it.
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The third position is the crisis, and the mistake here is strategic: a pull toward outward activity before its time. Such nourishment is called knocked off course — the very rhythm the situation lives by has been broken. Worst of all, persistence, usually a virtue, works toward disaster here: holding steadily to a wrong road means deepening the pit. The source writes out the longest term in the sign — ten years without action, until the position changes at its root. There is nothing favorable at this point.
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The second step looks for support in the wrong place. Hope for help from above is empty — the force one would naturally turn to is weak itself and will feed nobody. The attempt to settle to the side is marked by the image of a hill of sand: an embankment that crumbles under whoever sits on it. Nourishment has turned inside out — one has to feed oneself against the arrangement of the situation. Going upward in such a position is ruinous; an expedition from here ends in misfortune.
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The first line draws a person who owns a magic tortoise — a thing of the highest order of value — and drops it while staring at someone else's goods, mouth falling open with greed. One's own means of living are forgotten for the sake of envy. The verdict of the source is unambiguous — misfortune, and its root is named exactly: a lack of independence in one's thinking. Whoever measures their life by someone else's prosperity has already given away the main thing they had, and given it away willingly.
The six steps read as a single test of independence. At the bottom the envious one perishes, staring into someone else's bowl; higher up, attempts to sit on someone else's support and to jump into activity ahead of time both fail. Only two moves work: to lean honestly on your own source of strength, even if it stands below you, and to hold a pause where strength is short. Then the ending opens the great water. The one who has fed themselves turns out to be the only one equal to other people's scale.