Hexagram 21噬嗑Biting Through
Biting Through is the hexagram for the moment when an obstacle must be removed by decisive force — and the discipline of biting cleanly: enough force to clear the obstruction, no more than necessary, and not as punishment for its own sake. The hexagram refuses both the failure to act and the over-corrective bite that destroys the mouth along with the bone.
60-second read
Biting Through is the hexagram for the obstruction that must be removed. Thunder below, fire above — thunder and lightning, the visible force of judgement striking. The hexagram statement is direct: success comes through using criminal punishments. The instruction is not cruelty; the instruction is decisive removal of what is in the way. The discipline runs along a narrow ridge between two failures: refusing to bite, and biting so hard that the bite itself becomes the new problem. Read with the Xiang commentary's prescription — the former kings made the punishments clear and set the laws right — the hexagram is the I Ching's clean picture of judgement that can be seen, applied, and finished.
The hexagram
噬嗑：亨，利用獄。
Biting Through: success. Advantage in using criminal punishments. — Translation by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese
“Shih Ho indicates successful progress (in the condition of things which it supposes). It will be advantageous to use legal constraints.”
— James Legge, The Sacred Books of the East: The I Ching (1882), public domain.
The six lines
Click any line on the hexagram to read its passage. Use ↑ and ↓ after focusing the hexagram to step through the six positions.
屨校滅趾，無咎。
Feet in the stocks; the toes are cut off. No fault.
“The first NINE, undivided, shows one with his feet in the stocks and (deprived of his) toes. There will be no error.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 1 is the yang at the bottom of the lower trigram of thunder — the first stirring of the corrective force, and in the criminal-justice framing of the hexagram, the first stratum of punishment: feet in the stocks, the toes immobilised. The image is severe; the verdict is not. 無咎 — no fault. The hexagram is precise. At line 1 the offence is small and the correction is correspondingly small. The actor under correction has been stopped before they could walk further into the offence; the institution applying the correction has acted while the matter is still containable. The stocks are not the gallows. The discipline is in catching the drift early.
In a decision context this is the line of the first formal warning, the first written notice, the first time a behaviour that had been tolerated is named as a violation of the rule. The line is explicit that the small, visible correction is precisely the discipline that prevents the line-6 catastrophic ending. Founders and operators who learn to read line 1 cleanly stop the pattern before the pattern hardens — the team member is told clearly that the missed deadline matters, the customer is told clearly that the abusive message crossed a line, the supplier is told clearly that the quality miss has been logged. The actor under correction may bristle; the line is honest that the bristling is part of the cost. But the toes-only stratum of punishment is the cheapest correction the hexagram offers, and the no-fault verdict is unambiguous about its value.
噬膚滅鼻，無咎。
Biting through soft flesh; the nose is cut off. No fault.
“The second SIX, divided, shows one biting through the soft flesh, and (going on to) bite off the nose. There will be no error.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 2 is the centred yin in the lower trigram — the position of the actor doing the biting at an early, easy bite. 噬膚 — biting through soft flesh, the easiest meat in the line texts that follow. And immediately the hexagram names the over-correction: 滅鼻, the nose is cut off. The bite goes further than the meat required. The hexagram's verdict — 無咎, no fault — is not absolution; it is recognition that even an excessive bite at this stratum, against a soft and yielding offence, does not produce structural damage. The yielding offender absorbs the over-correction without the institution paying for it.
For decision-makers this is the line of the manager who corrects a small subordinate offence with more force than the offence required and gets away with it — because the subordinate is junior, because the offence was obvious, because the team reads the bite as proportionate even though it was not. The line is precise about the danger. The no-fault verdict at line 2 trains the actor that the over-correction is costless; the same overshoot applied at lines 4 and 5, where the meat is harder and the figures more senior, produces exactly the costs the line-6 cangue records. The decision-relevant translation is severe and corrective. Line 2 is a warning disguised as a permission. The discipline is to read the soft-flesh case for what it is — the cheapest meat, the easiest bite — and to refuse to develop the habit of biting past the nose on the way to harder cases that will not absorb the overshoot.
噬腊肉，遇毒，小吝，無咎。
Gnawing dried flesh; meeting with poison. Slight regret, no fault.
“The third SIX, divided, shows one gnawing dried flesh, and meeting with what is disagreeable. There will be slight occasion for regret, but no (great) error.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 3 is the top of the lower trigram and the line where the easy meat has run out. 噬腊肉 — gnawing dried flesh, the cured meat that has hardened and yields only with effort. 遇毒 — meeting with poison, the unpleasant taint inside the meat that turns the bite from work into mild disgust. The line names two specific costs: 小吝, slight regret, and 無咎, no great fault. The hexagram is honest about the texture. The actor applying the correction encounters the offender's residual resistance, the politics of the case, the unpleasant background facts that did not appear when the matter looked simple from above.
In a decision context this is the line of the investigation that turns up something messy — the disciplinary case where the offender turns out to have a sympathetic backstory, the customer-fraud claim where the customer has a partial point, the supplier-quality dispute where the supplier reveals upstream pressures that complicate the verdict. The hexagram is explicit that the discovery does not change the verdict; the bite still completes, the correction still applies. What changes is the cost to the actor — 小吝, a slight regret that the case was not as clean as it first appeared, that the work required more chewing than the brief estimated. The line is a check against the actor who wants every disciplinary case to be morally tidy. Most are not. The fortune named is the fortune of finishing the bite anyway, accepting the small regret, and refusing to let the messiness of the meat become an excuse to stop chewing.
噬乾胏，得金矢，利艱貞，吉。
Gnawing flesh dried on the bone; obtaining a golden arrow. Advantage in recognising the difficulty and being firm. Fortune.
“The fourth NINE, undivided, shows one gnawing the flesh dried on the bone, and getting the pledges of money and arrows. It will be advantageous to him to realise the difficulty of his task and be firm. There will be good fortune.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 4 is the yang that is itself the obstruction the hexagram is named for — the firm line interposed between the open jaws — and at the same time the seat of the actor whose bite has reached the hardest meat. 噬乾胏 — gnawing flesh dried on the bone, the most difficult meat in the entire line sequence. The bite is real work; the jaws strain. And then the second clause: 得金矢, obtaining a golden arrow. The reference is to the ancient legal practice of arrows deposited as pledges in a contested case. The actor's hard bite produces a specific, valuable result: the institutional token that the case is closed and the judgement holds.
The instruction is the third clause: 利艱貞 — advantage in recognising the difficulty and being firm. The hexagram is precise that the line-4 bite is not the soft-flesh case of line 2. The actor must recognise that the meat is hard, that the bite will require sustained pressure, and that firm-correctness — not increased force — is what carries the work. For decision-makers this is the line of the senior leader removing a difficult, senior obstacle: the long-tenured executive whose performance has degraded but whose institutional weight is real, the customer whose contract is significant but whose behaviour has crossed the line, the partnership whose strategic value is genuine but whose operational drag has become structural. The line is unambiguous that the fortune comes only when the actor accepts the difficulty — does not pretend the case is simple, does not look for a shortcut, does not delegate the unpleasantness — and bites firmly. 吉 — fortune — is the line's verdict, and the golden arrow is the institutional ratification that the bite was the right bite.
噬乾肉，得黃金，貞厲，無咎。
Gnawing dried flesh; obtaining yellow gold. Firm-correctness, peril. No fault.
“The fifth SIX, divided, shows one gnawing at dried flesh, and finding the yellow gold. Let him be firm and correct, realising the peril (of his position). There will be no error.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 5 is the yielding line in the ruler's seat — the centred position of the figure whose authority must apply the corrective bite. 噬乾肉 — gnawing dried flesh, hard but not the bone-dried meat of line 4. 得黃金 — obtaining yellow gold, the centre's own colour and the precious metal of legitimate authority. The image is generous. The ruler's bite produces both the closure of the case and the gold that signifies centred-correctness in the act of judging. And then the warning: 貞厲, firm-correctness yet peril. The hexagram refuses to let the ruler's seat be comfortable. Even when the bite is correct, even when the gold is obtained, the position remains perilous.
The decision-relevant translation is precise. For the actor in the line-5 seat — the CEO disciplining a senior, the board removing a director, the regulator enforcing against a powerful entity — the hexagram instructs that the bite is necessary and that the bite is dangerous. The danger is not that the bite will fail; the bite, applied with firm-correctness, finds the gold. The danger is the cumulative cost of biting from the ruler's seat: every correction the ruler applies reduces the ruler's apparent neutrality, sharpens the field around the seat, and produces secondary opposition the ruler must then manage. The line's no-fault verdict is conditional on the recognition. The ruler who reads 貞厲 — firm-correctness yet peril — and applies the bite without pretending the bite is costless gets the gold. The ruler who imagines the gold is automatic, who bites with the soft-flesh confidence of line 2, produces exactly the line-6 cangue ending one level above their own position.
何校滅耳，凶。
Wearing the cangue; the ears are cut off. Evil.
“The topmost NINE, undivided, shows one wearing the cangue, and deprived of his ears. There will be evil.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 6 is the topmost line and the picture of what happens when the corrections at line 1 were refused. The cangue — the heavy wooden collar that immobilised the head and shoulders of a serious offender — replaces the modest stocks of line 1. 滅耳, the ears are cut off, naming the highest stratum of mutilating punishment in the early Chinese penal code. The hexagram's verdict is unambiguous: 凶, evil. The hexagram statement promised success through the use of criminal punishments; line 6 names the inverse failure mode, the actor whose pattern of refusing the small early correction has produced the offence the institution must now meet with maximum force.
For decision-makers this is the line of the executive whose pattern of minor violations was tolerated through a dozen line-1 moments and who now faces a termination-with-cause that ends a career, the customer whose abuse went unchecked through repeated soft warnings and who is now banned with public notice, the supplier whose quality drift was accepted through three contracts and who is now removed from the approved list entirely. The hexagram is honest about who pays. The cangue is on the offender; the ears were cut from the offender. But the institution that arrives at line 6 has also failed — has failed to apply the line-1 toes-only correction when it was still cheap, has refused the line-2 soft-flesh bite when the offence was small enough to absorb the corrective force. The line is the I Ching's most precise warning about the cost of accumulated toleration. The cheapest moment to prevent the cangue was the stocks. Read with the hexagram statement's promise — 利用獄, advantage in using criminal punishments — line 6 names the structural lesson: punishments work when they are clear and early, and the failure to apply them clearly and early produces the very ending the punishments were meant to prevent.
PostureDecisive bite · the obstruction that must be removed
Biting Through is the hexagram of decisive action. The trigram structure is the whole picture: Zhen (thunder) below, Li (fire) above — thunder and lightning, the visible force of judgement striking. The hexagram image is the mouth biting through an obstruction lodged between the teeth: the fourth yang line interposed between the two open jaws of the surrounding broken lines. The hexagram statement is direct: 亨，利用獄 — success, advantage in using criminal punishments. The instruction is not cruelty; the instruction is the structural recognition that some obstructions can only be removed by force, and that the refusal to apply the force is itself the deeper failure.
The Xiang commentary makes the prescription explicit: 雷電噬嗑。先王以明罰勅法 — thunder and lightning, Biting Through; the former kings accordingly made punishments clear and set the laws right. The image refuses to make Biting Through a hexagram about retribution. The first work the former kings did was to make the punishments visible — 明罰, illuminate the penalties — so that the corrective force was legible before it was applied. The second work was to set the laws right — 勅法, correct the statutes — so that the bite, when it came, was the bite of a known rule and not of arbitrary will. The whole hexagram is the I Ching’s instruction for institutional judgement that can be seen, applied, and finished without becoming a spectacle of force.
Failure modesBiting past the nose (line 2) · cangue at the top (line 6)
The dominant failure mode is the line-2 over-correction habit — biting through the soft flesh and going on to bite off the nose. The hexagram’s no-fault verdict at line 2 is a warning disguised as a permission: the soft offender absorbs the over-correction without structural damage, and the actor learns that biting past the meat is costless. Applied at the harder stratum of lines 4 and 5, where the offence is senior and the case is institutional, the same overshoot produces exactly the costs the hexagram’s top line records. The secondary failure is the line-6 inverse: an actor whose pattern of refusing the line-1 toes-only correction has accumulated until the offence has hardened past the stratum where small punishments could contain it. Both failures share a root: an actor who treats corrective force as a feeling — squeamishness in the line-1 case, vindication in the line-2 case — rather than as a calibrated response to the specific stratum the offence has reached.
Application & adjacentQuestion shape · Hexagram 22 pair · Removing what politeness has tolerated
A note on the question shape this hexagram answers best. Biting Through rewards questions framed around a specific obstruction that must be removed by decisive force — a non-performing employee whose pattern has finally crossed a clear line, a disruptive customer whose abuse has exhausted the goodwill that was meant to accommodate it, a regulatory violator whose conduct will not be self-corrected, a process bottleneck that has been politely tolerated past the point where toleration is itself the problem. It is less useful for vague questions about whether the actor should be more assertive in general; for that question, re-read with Hexagrams 43 — Breakthrough — or 49 — Revolution — depending on whether the action is the rupture of an accumulated pressure or the wholesale change of a regime. Biting Through presumes the obstruction is specific and the bite is local.
The canonical adjacent reading is Hexagram 22 — Grace — the immediate successor in the King Wen sequence and the hexagram’s structural pair. Where Hexagram 21 puts thunder below fire and names the decisive force of judgement striking, Hexagram 22 puts fire below mountain and names the cultivated form that adorns the substance. Read together, the pair is the I Ching’s instruction for the two halves of institutional life: in 21 you remove what must be removed by clean and visible force; in 22 you compose the surface so the substance can be received. The pair refuses both the regime that polishes the surface while letting the obstructions accumulate beneath it, and the regime that bites everything in sight while neglecting the form that makes the bite legible as judgement rather than as arbitrary violence. TheXiang’s 明罰勅法 — making the punishments clear and the laws right — is the bridge: clarity of form is what lets the bite be a bite rather than an explosion.
The operational centre of the hexagram is the line-4 / line-5 pair, where the bite is hardest and the institutional stakes are highest. For the actor in those seats, the decision-relevant move is twofold. First, recognise the stratum: line 4’s bone-dried flesh is not line 2’s soft meat, and the line is explicit that the fortune depends on 利艱貞 — advantage in recognising the difficulty and being firm. Second, accept the peril: line 5’s yellow gold comes only with 貞厲 — firm-correctness yet peril — the explicit acknowledgement that even a correct bite from the ruler’s seat carries cost. Operators who treat the bite as costless produce the line-6 cangue one level above their own position. Operators who read the stratum and accept the peril find the gold the hexagram named.
SynthesisYiGram Editorial
Each Western line of reading approaches Biting Through from a different angle. James Legge transliterates 噬嗑 as “Shih Ho” and frames the hexagram within his Confucian moral lens — the canonical instruction on the legitimate use of criminal punishments, with the line texts read as a graduated sequence of penal strata from stocks to cangue. Richard Wilhelm’s symbolic-philosophical posture reads the hexagram more naturalistically — the mouth biting through the obstruction within itself — and treats Biting Through as the structural principle of clearing what lodges within a field, rather than as primarily a legal hexagram. A reading in the lineage of Carl Jung’s 1949 foreword would treat 21 as a marker of the psyche encountering a foreign object that must be assimilated or expelled, with the bite as the decisive act of integration or removal. Bradford Hatcher’s linguistic project (below) abandons all three framings and returns to the semantic field of 噬嗑 itself — bite, chew, clamp down, the full vocabulary range of retributive justice and the instruments of legal constraint. None of these readings is quoted on this page; the synthesis is YiGram Editorial’s characterization of each tradition’s posture, written so a reader can triangulate the field without us reproducing copyrighted text.
Reception historyLegge · Wilhelm · Baynes · Jung
The Western reception of the I Ching has two main lines. The first is James Legge’s 1882 missionary translation in the Sacred Books of the East series — methodical, Victorian, framed around Confucian moral readings. It is the public-domain anchor reproduced above. The second is Richard Wilhelm’s 1923 German translation, prepared in Qingdao in collaboration with Lao Naixuan — sympathetic, philosophical, closer to Daoist intuitions. Cary F. Baynes rendered Wilhelm into English in 1950, with a foreword by Carl Jung that introduced the book to Western psychology as a window onto synchronicity and the unconscious.
We cite these two lines by name to credit the reception history and to help search systems and readers resolve the entities; the Wilhelm/Baynes text itself and Jung’s foreword remain in copyright and are not quoted on this page. A more recent academic-linguistic line is represented by Bradford Hatcher’s Yijing project (1990s–2010s), which appears in the next section under his explicit redistribution permission.
Bradford HatcherVerbatim · © 2011
Hatcher organizes each hexagram around six short clusters of keywords that sketch the field of decision and association the Chinese name opens onto. For Hexagram 21 噬嗑, his clusters are:
Gnaw, chew, bite + close together, shut noisily, clamp down; meta-level solutions Retributive justice, enforcement, force, execution, dispatch, severity, lex talionis Emphatic judgment; police action & power; legal recourse, punishment, sentence Cogency, credibility, teeth, bite, decisiveness, incisiveness, trenchancy; severance Instruments of justice, legal constraints, criminal law (dist Gua 06, civil disputes) Insufferable things; accountability, culpability; closure, finality, termination, ends
Hatcher’s framing is vocabulary-centred rather than narrative — the reader is invited to feel the semantic shape of the Chinese name through the spread of English fragments. For his longer notes and the full glossary entry, read the complete passage on hermetica.info.
Quoted verbatim from Bradford Hatcher, Yijing Hexagram Names and Core Meanings (Version 12.1, 2011), hermetica.info/GuaMing.htm. © Bradford Hatcher, 2011. Reproduced under the author’s explicit permission to redistribute his work intact, with copyright notice. Bradford Hatcher (d. June 2020); site maintained to preserve his work.
SynthesisYiGram Editorial
Read across the four Chinese traditions, Hexagram 21 names a very specific working posture: an obstruction has lodged itself within the field of action, and the discipline is the decisive removal of the obstruction by force calibrated to its stratum. The Wings give the canonical reading: something within the jaws — called Biting Through; thunder and lightning unite and become bright; the yielding attains the centre and proceeds upward; the former kings made the punishments clear and set the laws right. Wang Bi sharpens the structural reading: 噬嗑 is not a hexagram about retribution but about clearance, and the line-by-line texts describe a graduated series of strata at which the bite encounters increasingly difficult meat. Zhu Xi reframes the hexagram around the line-4 / line-5 pair — the bone-dried flesh and the yellow gold — and stresses that the fortune of the entire hexagram concentrates at the positions where the bite is hardest and the actor recognises both the difficulty and the peril. The divinatory manual Bushi Zhengzong reads 21 strictly as the marker for active enforcement, disciplinary cases, and the removal of a specific institutional obstruction — not as commentary on whether the actor has the moral standing to bite. The unified posture across all four sources is the same: Biting Through is a discipline for applying corrective force at the stratum the offence has reached, with the clarity of the rule visible in front of the bite.
Yi ZhuanTuan + Xiang · Ten Wings
The Ten Wings are the canonical Confucian commentary stratum embedded in the received Yijing. For Hexagram 21 the two most directly relevant Wings are the Tuan Zhuan (彖傳, the Judgement Commentary) and the Xiang Zhuan (象傳, the Image Commentary).
Tuan 彖傳: 頤中有物，曰噬嗑。噬嗑而亨。剛柔分，動而明，雷電合而章，柔得中而上行，雖不當位，利用獄也。
Something within the jaws — called Biting Through. Biting through, success. Firm and yielding divided; movement and brightness; thunder and lightning unite and become bright; the yielding attains the centre and proceeds upward. Though the positions are not correct, it is advantageous to use criminal punishments.
Xiang 象傳: 雷電噬嗑。先王以明罰勅法。
Thunder and lightning — Biting Through. The former kings accordingly made punishments clear and set the laws right.
The Tuan does the structural work: the obstruction inside the jaws — 頤中有物 — is what gives the hexagram its name, and the conjunction of movement (thunder below) and brightness (fire above) is what makes the corrective force legible rather than arbitrary. The same Wing names the institutional ground: even though the positions of the lines are not all correct, 利用獄 — it is advantageous to use criminal punishments — precisely because the obstruction must be cleared. The Xiang compresses the whole hexagram into a four-character institutional prescription: 明罰勅法 — make the punishments clear and set the laws right — treating the legibility of the rule as the structural condition for legitimate force. The bite is not an outburst; the bite is the visible application of a rule that was visible before the offence. Translations by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese.
Classical commentariesWang Bi · Zhu Xi · Bushi Zhengzong
Wang Bi (Zhouyi Zhu, 3rd century) reads Hexagram 21 as a hexagram about clearance rather than about retribution. For Wang Bi the analytical centre is the line-4 yang — the very obstruction the hexagram is named for, and at the same time the seat at which the corrective bite reaches its hardest meat. The hexagram’s structural logic is that the obstruction is internal to the field of action, not external, and the line texts describe a graduated set of strata at which the actor encounters increasing resistance. The hexagram’s decision logic, in Wang Bi’s reading, is the precise mapping of the force that each stratum requires, and the warning that force calibrated to a softer stratum produces either failure to clear (at the harder strata) or destructive overshoot (at the softer ones).
Zhu Xi (Zhouyi Benyi, 1188) reframes the hexagram around the line-4 / line-5 pair — the bone-dried flesh and the yellow gold — as the operational centre of the reading. For Zhu Xi the line-4 golden arrow and the line-5 yellow gold are not symbolic rewards but structural confirmations: the bite at the hardest stratum, applied with firm-correctness and the recognition of difficulty, produces the institutional token that the case is closed. The corollary is that line 6’s cangue is not the offender’s fault alone; it is the institution’s failure to have applied the line-1 toes-only correction while the matter was still containable.
The Bushi Zhengzong (Qing-dynasty divinatory manual, 1709) reads 21 practically: a hexagram drawn in answer to a question about active enforcement, a disciplinary case, the removal of a specific institutional obstruction, or a regulatory action that has reached the bite stage. The manual is explicit that 21 is not a commentary on whether the actor has the moral standing to bite; the cast applies whether the actor is the institution applying the correction or the figure receiving it. The practical recommendation tracks the line position the question lands at: catch the drift early at line 1; refuse the over-correction habit at line 2; finish the bite through the tainted meat at line 3; recognise the difficulty and stay firm at line 4; accept the peril of the ruler’s seat at line 5; treat line 6 as the structural warning that accumulated toleration produces the cangue.
Translations and paraphrase by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese. We do not reuse any modern third-party English rendering of these commentaries.
These method notes are not required to read the hexagram. They organize the traditional six-line structure for readers who want to see the rule layer beneath the plain-language reading.
Palace: Xun (wind / wood), fifth-generation (五世) position. Binary, bottom-up: 100101. Lower trigram: Zhen (thunder). Upper trigram: Li (fire). Shi line: 5. Ying line: 2.
The line branches, bottom-up, follow the Zhen-below / Li-above najia composition for Biting Through: 子 (line 1), 寅 (line 2), 辰 (line 3), 酉 (line 4), 未 (line 5), 巳 (line 6). Read against the Xun palace, whose element is wood, the six-relatives assignments are: line 1 子 (water) — parents (父母); line 2 寅 (wood) — siblings (兄弟); line 3 辰 (earth) — wealth (妻財); line 4 酉 (metal) — officer-ghost (官鬼); line 5 未 (earth) — wealth (妻財); line 6 巳 (fire) — offspring (子孫).
The shi line at position 5 carries wealth (未, earth), the element the Xun palace’s wood controls outward — the actor stands in the ruler’s seat at the position where the palace’s own force directs the working field. The ying line at position 2 carries siblings (寅, wood), the same element as the Xun palace itself — the receiving position is the palace’s own native ground. The structural correlate of the Xiang’s 明罰勅法: the ruling bite is applied from the seat where the palace controls the field, and the response is received at the seat that shares the palace’s own element. The line-4 officer-ghost (酉, metal) is the structural obstruction itself — the element that controls the palace’s wood — which is the najia-layer reason the line-4 bite is the hardest in the sequence and the verdict turns on 利艱貞, recognising the difficulty.
For a cast, this static layer records the palace, generation label, shi and ying positions, each line's branch and six-relative, moving-line positions, transformed hexagram, and the use-spirit selected by question category. The public page keeps that structure as a method note rather than as default reading text.
Audit status: unaudited_draft. The static-layer tables are pulled from the standard 京房纳甲 sequence and have not yet been cross-checked against the three reference texts named in the methodology. Errors should be reported against the v0.1.0 rule version in the GitHub rules directory.
For the full pipeline (how the static layer reaches the AI interpretation), see Methodology → Najia engine.
Sources
- Classical text of the Yijing (周易) — hexagram and line statements (卦辭 / 爻辭) from the received Zhou-dynasty edition. Public domain.
- James Legge, The Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XVI: The Yi King, Oxford University Press, 1882. Public domain.
- Zhu Xi (朱熹), Zhouyi Benyi (周易本義), 1188. Public domain.
- Wang Bi (王弼), Zhouyi Zhu (周易注), 3rd century. Public domain.
- Bushi Zhengzong (卜筮正宗), Qing-dynasty divinatory manual, 1709. Public domain.
- Tuan Zhuan (彖傳) and Xiang Zhuan (象傳), two of the Ten Wings (十翼). Public domain.
- Bradford Hatcher, Yijing Hexagram Names and Core Meanings (Version 12.1, 2011). © Bradford Hatcher, 2011. Reproduced under the author’s explicit permission to redistribute his work intact, with copyright notice; this page quotes the “Key Words” subsection only and links readers to the full original for the longer notes. Bradford Hatcher (d. June 2020).
All Chinese-to-English translations on this page are by YiGram Editorial, working directly from the classical Chinese. We do not reuse third-party modern English translations of any of the listed Chinese sources. Read the full source policy in the methodology page.
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