Hexagram 24復Return
A long downward trend has just reversed, and the first sign of recovery is so small it can be denied or overstated with equal ease. The practical question is whether you can recognise the turn without committing to it as though the recovery were already complete.
60-second read
Return is the hexagram of the first faint reversal — a single yang line stirring at the bottom of an otherwise yin field, the winter solstice past midnight. The downward arc has just turned. The recovery is real but it is small, new, and easily killed by being treated as though it were already complete. The discipline is to recognise the turn, protect it, and let the canonical seven-day interval pass before acting as though the return is structural. The trap is the line-6 strayed return: the actor who saw the turn, mistook it for the destination, and pressed forward into terrain the new yang cannot yet sustain. Nurse the early signal. Move only when the signal repeats.
The hexagram
復：亨。出入無疾，朋來無咎。反復其道，七日來復，利有攸往。
Return: success. There is no distress in exits and entrances; friends come and no fault is given. It returns and repeats its way; in seven days the return comes. Advantage in whatever direction. — Translation by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese
“Fû indicates that there will be free course and progress (in what it denotes). (The subject of it) finds no one to distress him in his exits and entrances; friends come to him, and no error is committed. He will return and repeat his (proper) course. In seven days comes his return. There will be advantage in whatever direction movement is made.”
— 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.
不遠復，無祗悔，元吉。
Return before going far. No occasion for great regret. Primal good fortune.
“The first NINE, undivided, shows its subject returning (from an error of) no great extent. There would be no occasion for repentance. There will be great good fortune.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 1 is the single yang in the entire hexagram and the only line that actually carries the returning force. The fortune named here — 元吉, primal good fortune — is the strongest possible verdict in the Yijing, and the hexagram gives it not to the ruler line at position 5 but to this lowest, smallest, most freshly-returned position. The structural claim is unambiguous: the moment of correction is fortunate precisely because it is early. The drift has not yet hardened into pattern; the turn does not yet require explanation; the cost of correcting is still small.
In a decision context this is the same-week reversal scenario. You notice you have been moving in the wrong direction — a relationship, a product line, a business commitment, a personal habit — and you have not yet been moving in it long enough for the reversal itself to need narrative cover. The line-1 instruction is to turn back inside the current cycle rather than wait for the more dramatic correction the later lines describe. 不遠復 — return before going far. The further you go, the more the eventual return must justify itself; the closer the drift, the cleaner the correction.
A practical test for whether you are in a line-1 situation: write down, in a single sentence, what changed your mind. If the sentence is short — a fresh piece of evidence, a recent conversation, a single quarter of data — the line-1 return is healthy and the cost is small. If the sentence requires a paragraph of self-justification, you are likely past line 1 already and the hexagram is naming a different position. Most line-1 returns are unannounced corrections. The line wants you to take them quickly, not to perform them.
休復，吉。
An admirable return. Fortune.
“The second SIX, divided, shows the admirable return (of its subject). There will be good fortune.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 2 is the centred position inside the lower trigram — the same trigram Zhen (thunder, stirring) that carries the new yang underneath it. The character 休 is unusually warm in this divinatory context: not merely “good” but “admirable, beautiful, beneficent”. The line names a specific quality of return that the lowest line does not yet have access to — one that is recognised by others as well-formed, not just expedient.
What separates the line-2 return from the line-1 return is the relationship with the surrounding field. Line 1 is the act of the single yang itself; line 2 is the response of the closest yin neighbour. The decision-relevant version: line 1 is the actor's own internal correction; line 2 is the visible support the correction begins to attract from the people structurally closest to it. A team member who returns to the right approach, and whose immediate manager recognises the return without needing to be lobbied for the recognition. A founder who pivots back to the original thesis, and whose closest cofounder reads the move as obviously correct.
The practical instruction is to make the line-1 return clean enough that the line-2 admiration follows naturally. This is not about performance — line 2 is not earned by announcing the correction. It is earned by the form of the correction itself. A return that is partial, conditional, or hedged will not produce the line-2 response; a return that is complete enough to be recognised will. Most line-1 corrections that fail to attract line-2 support fail because they were not actually corrections — they were repositioning moves dressed as corrections, and the closest neighbours could tell.
頻復，厲，無咎。
Repeated returns. The position is perilous. No fault.
“The third SIX, divided, shows one who has made repeated returns. The position is perilous, but there will be no error.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 3 is the line of repeated correction. 頻復 — literally “frequent return” — describes an actor who has turned back, drifted again, turned back again, and is now on a third or fourth iteration of the same correction. The line is honest about the cost: 厲, the position is perilous. Every additional cycle of drift-and-return compounds the difficulty of the next return. But the line is also honest about the verdict: 無咎, no fault. The repeated return is harder than the line-1 return, and harder than the line-2 admirable return, but it is still a return.
In a decision context this is the recovering-actor pattern. The founder who has now relapsed into the same micro-management habit four times in the last quarter. The team that has now reverted to the abandoned process twice since the new one was set. The personal pattern that has reasserted itself across several attempted corrections. The hexagram does not romanticise the difficulty. The peril is real because the third iteration of the same return carries the cumulative weight of the previous failures, and because the actor's confidence in the return itself begins to thin. But the line withholds the verdict of fault. As long as the return continues to happen, the position is salvageable.
The practical move at line 3 is to deliberately reduce the cost of the next return rather than to attempt a more impressive one. Lower the trigger threshold for noticing the drift. Make the corrective action smaller and faster, not larger and more dramatic. The line-3 actor's most common mistake is to overcorrect on the third iteration to compensate for the previous two, which produces a new drift in the opposite direction and starts the cycle over. The hexagram is asking for the same modest return, more frequently, with less narrative attached to each cycle. Repeated return without fault is what the line names; repeated return without fanfare is how it is achieved.
中行獨復。
Moving in the middle, returning alone.
“The fourth SIX, divided, shows its subject moving right in the centre (among those represented by the other divided lines), and yet returning alone (to the proper path).”
— Legge (1882)
Line 4 is the structurally lonely line of the hexagram. The actor sits in the middle of the field — 中行, moving among the others — but is the only one to return. All the other yin lines around line 4 are still moving in the drift-direction the new yang at line 1 has begun to reverse. The line-4 actor has read the turn correctly while the surrounding field has not. The line is not graded with fortune or misfortune. It is simply described.
In a decision context this is the early-signal reader inside a still-drifting group. The analyst who recognises the market reversal before the desk does. The executive who sees the strategy beginning to fail before the board acknowledges it. The community member who notices the cultural drift before the rest of the community catches up. The structural difficulty is that the return is correct but private — the actor at line 4 cannot rely on the surrounding lines to validate the move, because those lines are by structural design still pointing the other way.
The practical instruction line 4 carries is implicit but consistent with the rest of the hexagram: return anyway, and do not wait for the field to catch up before acting. The fortune of the early lines depends on acting on the small new signal before the larger structural reversal has become obvious to everyone. If the line-4 actor waits for the field to validate the return, the return is no longer early, and the specific advantage the early return carries is lost. The cost of returning alone is real — the loneliness is structural, not psychological — but it is the cost the line is asking the actor to pay. Line 4 is a position, not a complaint.
敦復，無悔。
A noble, weighty return. No regret.
“The fifth SIX, divided, shows the noble return (of its subject). There will be no ground for repentance.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 5 is the ruler line, and the character 敦 — rendered as “noble” or “weighty” or “honest, thick, substantial” — carries the specific tone of a return made with the full weight of the actor’s standing behind it. This is not the lone correction of line 4 and not the repeated correction of line 3. This is the correction the senior figure makes publicly, taking responsibility for the drift in their own voice, without softening or externalising the cause. 無悔 — no regret — is the verdict that follows when the return is substantive enough to settle the question.
What makes line 5 unusual in the hexagram of Return is that the ruling position carries a yin line rather than a yang line, which the Yijing usually reads as the position being held by someone whose strength is receptiveness rather than initiative. The line is naming a specific quality of leadership return: not the dramatic about-face of the great-man pivot at H49's line 5, but the unforced, accountable, weighty acknowledgement that the direction needs to change and that the responsibility for the change sits with the person at the centre. There is no theatre. There is no rescue narrative. The return is made because it is correct, and the position holds enough authority that the correction settles immediately.
For decision-makers at senior altitude this is the line that names the most powerful form the return can take. The CEO who quietly reverses a strategic commitment in the next all-hands, owning the prior call without flinching. The board chair who reverses a hiring decision without scapegoating. The community elder who walks back a public position with the full weight of their standing behind the walk-back. The hexagram is naming the form, not the content. The form requires that the actor has accumulated enough trust over time that the return can be made without performance. Line 5 is the line that says: when you have the standing to do this, do it now.
迷復，凶，有災眚。用行師，終有大敗，以其國君，凶。至于十年，不克征。
Strayed in returning. Misfortune. There are calamities and faults. To deploy armies brings, in the end, great defeat, reaching even to the ruler of the state. Misfortune. For ten years, no expedition is possible.
“The sixth SIX, divided, shows its subject all astray on the subject of returning. There will be evil. There will be calamities and errors. If with his views he put the hosts in motion, the end will be a great defeat, whose issues will extend to the ruler of the state. Even in ten years he will not be able to repair the disaster.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 6 is the most severe warning the hexagram contains, and the one that most contemporary readings underweight. 迷復 — the strayed return — names a specific failure mode: the actor who saw the turn at line 1, mistook the early signal for full structural recovery, and pressed forward as though the new yang had already filled the field. The single returning line at the bottom cannot, by itself, sustain a campaign at the top. The line texts spell out the consequences without softening: calamities, errors, deployed armies defeated, the failure reaching up to the ruler of the state, and a recovery interval of ten years. The Yijing rarely names ten years. When it does, it means the damage outlasts the current cycle.
In a decision context this is the over-extended recovery pattern. The actor who notices a market reversing and pours capital into the new direction as though the recovery is structural. The team that sees an early positive signal from a product change and rebuilds the roadmap around it before the signal has had time to repeat. The personal recovery — health, relationship, work habit — that the actor treats as complete after a single good week and immediately overcommits. The hexagram does not blame the early recognition. The recognition itself is what line 1's fortune is named for. The misfortune lands when the actor confuses the recognition with the recovery, and acts on the size of the eventual recovery while standing inside the small reality of its earliest moment.
The practical defence is to hold the seven-day interval the hexagram statement names. 七日來復 — in seven days the return comes — is not a metaphor for patience. It is a specific structural constraint. The new yang at line 1 is not the recovery; it is the first signal of the recovery's possibility. The return becomes structural across a full cycle, not within a single moment. The line-6 catastrophe is what happens when the actor treats the moment as the cycle. The instruction is to invest at the scale the present truly justifies, not at the scale the expected future implies. Most line-6 disasters could have been averted by waiting one more cycle of evidence before scaling the commitment. The hexagram is severe on this line because the failure is structurally avoidable and consistently expensive.
PostureFirst yang returning · the turn before it is structural
Return sits at the earliest moment of a reversal. The composition is precise: five yin lines stacked above a single yang line at the bottom, the lower trigram Zhen (thunder, the first stirring) underneath the upper trigram Kun (earth, the receptive ground). The image the Xiang commentary gives is 雷在地中 — thunder within the earth — the moment when the rumbling of the new movement is real but is still happening beneath the surface. The drift has reversed. The recovery has not yet arrived.
The hexagram statement compresses the posture into a single phrase: 七日來復 — in seven days the return comes. The number is not symbolic flourish. The Tuan commentary explicitly names it as the cosmological constant of return — 天行也, the motion of heaven. The point is structural: the recovery completes across a full cycle, not within a single moment. The line at the bottom is the first signal; the cycle is the container in which the signal becomes substance. The discipline the hexagram is asking for is to recognise the first signal, act in proportion to what is actually present, and let the cycle complete before scaling the commitment.
What makes Return different from Decrease, Modesty, or Standstill is the specific quality of attention it asks for. You are not overhauling. You are not deliberating. You are not waiting in the abstract. You are nursing a small, new, recently-arrived signal that the long trend has reversed. The Xiang names the protective gesture exactly: the former kings, at the solstice, closed the gates — 至日閉關 — merchants did not travel, the ruler did not inspect the regions. The early yang is nursed by the deliberate withdrawal of activity that would burn it through prematurely. The posture of Return is active stillness around a small new fact. That is the whole instruction.
Failure modesActing too fully on the early signal · line-6 strayed return
The dominant failure mode of this hexagram is the line-6 pattern: 迷復, the strayed return. The actor reads the early signal correctly, mistakes the signal for the recovery, and presses forward at the scale the eventual recovery would justify. The line texts spell out the cost without softening — calamities, deployed armies defeated, ten years before another expedition is possible. The damage is not a near-miss. The damage outlasts the current cycle. The avoidance is straightforward in principle and difficult in practice: do not scale the commitment past the size of what is actually present. The single yang line at position 1 cannot sustain a campaign at position 6 yet. Wait for the cycle.
A secondary failure mode is the inverted one: the actor who refuses to recognise the return because the signal is so small. This is the line-1 fortune declined. The hexagram gives the strongest possible verdict — primal good fortune — to the smallest, freshest correction, precisely because the cost of correcting early is so low. An actor who insists on more evidence before acting on the first signal passes through line 1 into line 3's repeated-return territory, where the correction is more expensive and the position is named perilous. Both failure modes — the overreach of line 6 and the under-response of refusing line 1 — share a single root cause: misreading the relationship between the signal's size and the cycle's structure. The signal is supposed to be small. The cycle is what makes it large.
Application & adjacentQuestion shape · 七日來復 interval · Recovery / pivot recognition
A note on the question shape this hexagram answers best. Return rewards questions framed around the moment a long downward trend has just reversed — a relapse arrested, a strategy quietly walked back, a market beginning to turn after a sustained decline, a personal habit re-broken after a recent slip. It is less useful for questions about how to start something from scratch; for that the new energy has not yet had anything to return from. The hexagram presumes the actor has been moving in a direction, has begun to move the other way, and is asking how to read the early evidence of the reversal. If your question was open-ended exploration, re-read with Hexagram 3 — Difficulty at the Beginning — instead.
The canonical adjacent reading is Hexagram 23 (剝, Stripping Away) — the hexagram immediately before Return in the King Wen sequence, and the hexagram of the final stage of the downward arc that Return reverses. H23 is five yin lines pushing a single yang line out at the top; H24 is the same yang line reappearing at the bottom. Reading Return without Stripping Away tends to produce actors who treat the recovery as unconditional, because they have not held in view the long descent that preceded it. Reading Stripping Away without Return tends to produce actors who do not recognise the turn when it arrives, because they have not been told the turn is structurally guaranteed. The pair tells a complete arc: the yang is pushed out, descends through the cycle, and returns at the bottom — the literal definition of the seven-day return.
Return is also unusually demanding about pacing. The hexagram does not reference trust the way Revolution (H49) does, and it does not reference competence at construction the way the Cauldron (H50) does. It references the interval — 七日來復 — as the structural container the return moves through. For decision-makers this means the operational discipline of holding action proportional to evidence as the cycle unfolds. The line-1 actor turns back quickly. The line-2 actor lets the closest neighbour recognise the turn. The line-3 actor accepts the cost of repeated correction without overcorrecting. The line-4 actor returns alone when the field has not yet caught up. The line-5 actor uses standing to make the return weighty and final. The line-6 actor over-extends and loses ten years. The hexagram is the same hexagram for all six positions. The actor’s job is to recognise which position they are actually in, and to act at the scale that position permits.
Return is also unusually demanding about the actor's relationship with their own past direction. The hexagram is not about beginning. It is about turning back from a direction the actor was already moving in. The honesty required is specific: the actor must name the prior drift accurately before the return can land. A return that pretends the prior direction was not really chosen, or that re-frames the prior direction as someone else's responsibility, will not produce the fortunes the line texts describe — because the structural condition of the line texts is that the actor returns from somewhere, not merely toward somewhere. The hexagram's fortune is conditional on the actor's willingness to acknowledge the descent. Without that acknowledgement, the return becomes a repositioning move dressed as a return, and the small new yang is the wrong shape to support it.
SynthesisYiGram Editorial
Each Western line of reading approaches Return from a different angle. James Legge translates 復 as “Return” and frames the hexagram within his Confucian moral lens — the proper way is returned to, the seven-day interval is read as the cosmological cycle within which the recovery completes, and the line-1 fortune is graded as the strongest possible verdict because the correction is smallest. Richard Wilhelm’s symbolic-philosophical posture reads Return as the great image of the turning point — the winter solstice, the moment the light begins to grow again after the longest night, the natural-cycle reading the Tuan’s 天行 already authorises. A reading in the lineage of Carl Jung’s 1949 foreword would treat Return as a marker of psychic reversal — the moment the unconscious produces the first compensating movement after a long one-sided conscious drift, the early signal that the inner balance is being restored. Bradford Hatcher’s linguistic project (below) abandons all three framings and returns to the semantic field of 復 itself — coming back, coming home, coming around, the pivotal point, the winter solstice, rebirth. 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 24 復, his clusters are:
Coming back, coming home, coming around, beginning anew; to resume, retrace Re-; Restoration, restitution, redintegration, renewal, reunion, recovery, resilience Natural processes, cycles, the inevitability of cycles, recycling; renewed promise Pivotal point, still point, turning point, axis of the world, winter solstice, rebirth Core truths surviving digression, reconstitution, rededicated efforts, revitalization More coming around than turning back, 361 degrees instead of 180 degrees (Fan)
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 24 names a very specific moment: the single yang line returning at the bottom of an otherwise yin field, the literal winter solstice, the first turning of the downward arc. The Wings give the canonical cosmological-cum-ethical reading: the seven-day return is the motion of heaven (天行), the firm is growing (剛長), and in this hexagram one perhaps sees the mind of heaven and earth (復其見天地之心乎) — the line the Tuan uses to crown the entire hexagram. The Xiang compresses the political-ritual posture into a concrete instruction: at the solstice the former kings closed the gates, merchants did not travel, the ruler did not inspect the regions. The early yang is nursed by the deliberate withdrawal of activity. Wang Bi sharpens the structural reading: the new yang is the seed of the recovery, but only the seed, and the hexagram is naming the very specific window in which the seed must be protected rather than scaled. Zhu Xi reframes the hexagram around 復善 — returning to the good — and stresses that the return is an ethical act, not a tactical one; the line-1 fortune is named primal precisely because the correction is small enough to require no external justification. The divinatory manual Bushi Zhengzong reads 24 strictly as the marker for early reversals in answer to questions about whether a long-running downward trend has actually turned — it explicitly warns against reading the hexagram as a green light to act at the scale of full recovery before the cycle has completed. The unified posture across all four sources is the same: Return is a discipline for recognising the turn, nursing the early signal, and holding action proportional to the cycle until the recovery is structural rather than merely beginning.
Yi ZhuanTuan + Xiang · Ten Wings
The Ten Wings are the canonical Confucian commentary stratum embedded in the received Yijing. For Hexagram 24 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: 復，亨；剛反，動而以順行，是以出入無疾，朋來無咎。反復其道，七日來復，天行也。利有攸往，剛長也。復其見天地之心乎。
Return, success; the firm returns. It moves and proceeds with compliance — therefore “no distress in exits and entrances, friends come and no fault is given”. “Return and repeat its way, in seven days the return comes” — this is the motion of heaven. “Advantage in whatever direction” — the firm grows. In Return one perhaps sees the mind of heaven and earth.
Xiang 象傳: 雷在地中，復。先王以至日閉關，商旅不行，后不省方。
Thunder within the earth — Return. The former kings accordingly, at the day of solstice, closed the gates; merchants and travellers did not move; the ruler did not inspect the regions.
The Tuan does the cosmological-canonical work: it identifies the seven-day return as the explicit motion of heaven (天行), grounds the hexagram’s fortune in the growth of the firm line (剛長), and crowns the entire hexagram with the famous question — 復其見天地之心乎 — in Return, one perhaps sees the mind of heaven and earth. TheXiang does the ethical-political work: when the great image of thunder-within-the-earth is recognized, the noble person’s correct response is the protective withdrawal — close the gates at the solstice, halt the merchants, hold the ruler back from inspection. The early yang is nursed by the suspension of activity that would burn it through prematurely. The whole hexagram’s decision logic is compressed into that ritual instruction. Translations by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese.
Classical commentariesWang Bi · Zhu Xi · Bushi Zhengzong
Wang Bi (Zhouyi Zhu, 3rd century) puts the weight of Hexagram 24 on the structural smallness of the returning yang. The single firm line at the bottom is the seed of the recovery, not the recovery itself, and the hexagram is naming the very specific window in which the seed must be protected rather than scaled. For Wang Bi the line-1 fortune is named primal good fortune precisely because the correction is small enough to need no external justification; the line-6 catastrophe is named without softening precisely because the actor at that position has misread the seed as the harvest. The mechanical reading is austere: a single returning line cannot sustain a campaign, and the hexagram is the canonical instruction layer for that constraint.
Zhu Xi (Zhouyi Benyi, 1188) reframes the hexagram around 復善 — returning to the good — and reads the line texts as a graded ethics of correction. The line-1 return is unannounced and quick; the line-2 return is admirable because it is structurally clean; the line-3 return is repeated and costly but still without fault; the line-4 return is lonely but correct; the line-5 return carries the full weight of the actor’s standing; the line-6 strayed return is the catastrophic over-extension that follows from mistaking the seed for the harvest. For Zhu Xi the hexagram’s philosophical centre is the famous Tuan line — 復其見天地之心乎 — which he reads as the claim that the act of return itself reveals the generative motion of the cosmos. The return is not just strategically useful; it is the visible operation of the world’s own tendency to recover.
The Bushi Zhengzong (Qing-dynasty divinatory manual, 1709) reads 24 practically: a hexagram drawn in answer to a question about whether a long-running downward trend has actually turned — the early return of a market, the early recovery from an illness, the early reversal of a relationship drift, the early sign of a strategy beginning to work. The manual is explicit that 24 is not a marker for the completed recovery itself, and explicitly warns the reader against acting at the scale full recovery would justify before the seven-day cycle has had time to complete. The Return’s territory is the earliest moment of the reversal, not the reversal’s arrival.
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: Kun (earth). Generation: First (一世). Binary, bottom-up: 100000. Lower trigram: Zhen (thunder). Upper trigram: Kun (earth). Shi line: 1. Ying line: 4.
The line branches, bottom-up, follow the Zhen-below / Kun-above najia composition for Return: 子 (line 1), 寅 (line 2), 辰 (line 3), 丑 (line 4), 亥 (line 5), 酉 (line 6). Read against the Kun palace, whose element is earth, the six-relatives assignments are: line 1 子 (water) — wealth (妻財), because earth restrains water; line 2 寅 (wood) — officer-ghost (官鬼), because wood restrains earth; line 3 辰 (earth) — siblings (兄弟), the same element as the palace; line 4 丑 (earth) — siblings (兄弟); line 5 亥 (water) — wealth (妻財); line 6 酉 (metal) — offspring (子孫), because earth generates metal.
The shi line at position 1 carries wealth (子, water), the element that the Kun palace restrains as its yield. The ying line at position 4 carries siblings (丑, earth), the same element as the palace itself. Read as a structural pair, the shi-ying axis of Return says that the actor of the returning movement stands at the lowest position holding the yield the palace controls, while the receiving position belongs to the palace’s own substance. The structural correlate of the Tuan’s 剛反 — the firm returning — in najia language: the smallest, lowest line carries the produced wealth, and the answering position holds the field the palace itself is made of.
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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