Hexagram 31咸Mutual Influence
Lake above the mountain — the two energies stir and respond. The practical question is not whether attraction is real but where in the body it has arrived, how it is being received, and whether the receiver has emptied enough to take the influence in without distorting it.
60-second read
Mutual Influence opens the second half of the Yijing — the pair of hexagrams that begins with attraction (31) and continues with endurance (32), the way the first half opened with Heaven and Earth. The character 咸 originally meant universal or all-encompassing; the heart radical was added later to produce 感, to feel. The hexagram statement is brief and confident: success; advantage in firm correctness; take a wife — fortune. The line texts then walk up the body part by part — big toe, calves, thighs, back, upper back, jaws and tongue — naming where the stir first arrives and where the discipline of receiving it actually lives.
The hexagram
咸：亨，利貞，取女吉。
Mutual Influence: success. Advantage in firm correctness. Taking a wife — fortune. — Translation by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese
“Hsien indicates that, (on the fulfilment of the conditions implied in it), there will be free course and success. Its advantageousness will depend on the being firm and correct, (as) in marrying a young lady. There will be good fortune.”
— 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.
咸其拇。
Mutual influence in the big toe.
“The first SIX, divided, shows one moving his great toes.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 1 names the earliest, smallest physical site of influence: the big toe — 拇. The line text is two characters long. There is no judgement attached. The toe twitches; the actor has noticed an attraction is forming somewhere; nothing has yet been decided, performed, or said aloud. The line is the I Ching’s most economical picture of the first stir — the moment the body knows before the mind has caught up.
In a decision context this is the position before the courtship, the sale, the partnership conversation has actually begun. A profile interests you. A prospect mentions an interesting problem. A potential hire’s portfolio holds your attention longer than the others. The discipline at line 1 is to register the stir without acting on it — and without suppressing it either. The toe is allowed to move. The instruction is to read what part of the body the influence has arrived in, and to recognise that the influence is at its smallest, most reversible scale. Acting from the toe alone is premature. Refusing to feel the toe at all is the parallel failure. The line is asking the actor to notice, not yet to move.
咸其腓，凶。居吉。
Mutual influence in the calves. Evil. To stay still — fortune.
“The second SIX, divided, shows one moving the calves of his leg. There will be evil. If he abide (quiet in his place), there will be good fortune.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 2 raises the site of influence from the toe to the calves — 腓. The calves are what carry the actor toward something. When the calves stir, the body is already preparing to walk. The line is the only one in Mutual Influence that pairs an explicit 凶 — evil — with a saving instruction: 居吉, to stay still is fortunate. The warning is structural. The calves are the part of the body that moves before judgement arrives, and acting on the calves’ stir means going to meet the influence before the centred position of line 2 has done its work.
For decision-makers this is the line for the early courtship that wants to be accelerated. The first promising call has happened. The intuition says move now. The line says exactly the opposite: stay in place. Let the stir continue to register in the calves without converting it into a step toward the other party. Founders who pursue a prospect on the strength of the line-2 stir typically discover that they have made the offer before the prospect was ready to be approached, and the over-eagerness becomes legible. In recruiting this is the founder who messages the candidate twice in a week instead of once. In sales it is the rep who follows up the discovery call with a proposal the next morning. The line is unsentimental about the cost of premature pursuit. The fortune is named, but it is conditional on the stillness.
咸其股，執其隨，往吝。
Mutual influence in the thighs. Holding fast to whom one follows. Going forward — regret.
“The third NINE, undivided, shows one moving his thighs, and keeping close hold of those whom he follows. Going forward (in this way) will cause regret.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 3 is the highest line of the lower trigram Gen (艮, mountain) and the canonical warning of the hexagram. The site of influence has now reached the thighs — 股 — the part of the body that does not initiate movement on its own but follows whatever the legs below are doing. The line names the failure mode in four characters: 執其隨 — holding fast to whom one follows. The actor has stopped registering the stir and started clinging to the object of attraction. The verdict is 往吝: going forward in this posture brings regret.
The decision-relevant translation is precise and uncomfortable. At line 3 the actor has confused the stir of influence with possession of the influencer. In courtship this is the partner who has started planning a future with someone they have known for three weeks; in sales it is the rep who builds a forecast around a deal the prospect has not actually committed to; in recruiting it is the manager who treats the candidate as already hired and starts shaping the team around them. The hexagram is honest about what produces this failure: the thigh is a passive part of the body. The actor following someone they have not yet been chosen by is following with the wrong organ. The corrective is not to abandon the interest. The corrective is to drop the grip — to stop holding fast, to let the other party have the room to move independently — and to let the influence continue at the body’s natural pace. Pressing forward from line 3 produces the regret the line names.
貞吉，悔亡。憧憧往來，朋從爾思。
Firm-correctness: fortune. Regret vanishes. Restless going and coming — only your friends will follow your thoughts.
“The fourth NINE, undivided, shows that firm correctness which will lead to good fortune, and prevent all occasion for repentance. If its subject be unsettled in his movements, (only) his friends will follow his purpose.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 4 is the most theoretically dense line in the hexagram and the only one whose text does not name a part of the body — structurally significant because line 4 sits at the level of the heart. The instruction is built around a contrast.貞吉，悔亡 — firm-correctness produces fortune and regret vanishes. Then the warning: 憧憧往來，朋從爾思 — if the actor’s movement is restless, going back and forth, only friends already inclined toward the actor’s thinking will follow. The unsettled motion narrows the range of who can be influenced.
The decision-relevant translation is the operating principle for any actor whose work depends on persuading people they do not already control. Line 4 names the difference between centred attractive presence and restless self-promotion. The centred posture — firm-correctness — draws people who were not yet aligned. The restless posture draws only the existing circle, the people who were going to follow anyway. For founders this is the line for the fundraising cycle, the GTM motion, the platform shift. The instinct under pressure is to do more — more posts, more outreach, more meetings, more reframings of the same pitch. Line 4 says the opposite: the restlessness narrows the reach. Hold the position. Let the centred-ness be the influence. The regret the line offers to dissolve is precisely the regret of having spent the cycle in motion when the centred posture would have done the work.
咸其脢，無悔。
Mutual influence in the flesh of the upper back. No regret.
“The fifth NINE, undivided, shows one moving the flesh along the spine above the heart. There will be no occasion for repentance.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 5 is the ruler position and the highest centred line in the hexagram. The site of influence is now 脢 — the flesh of the upper back, traditionally read as the place just above the heart and just below the shoulders. The line text is, like line 1, deliberately minimal: the stir arrives in the upper back; there is no regret. The classical commentaries take the location as the structural point. The upper back is behind the actor; the influence has moved past the parts of the body that initiate forward motion and reached a place the actor cannot directly see or operate. The line is calm because nothing remains to be performed.
For decision-makers this is the line of the influence that no longer requires the actor’s active management. The candidate has accepted in principle; the partnership has the shape it needs to take; the prospect is ready to be closed. Line 5 is not about pushing harder at this stage. It is about the discipline of letting the influence land where it has landed. The most common line-5 failure in practice is over-confirmation — the founder who keeps reselling a deal that has already been won, the recruiter who keeps pitching after the offer has been verbally accepted, the partner who keeps explaining the value after the term sheet is on the table. The line names the corrective by what it withholds. No exhortation. No instruction to move. The fortune is the absence of regret — and the absence of regret is preserved by not reaching for the thing the line has already given you.
咸其輔頰舌。
Mutual influence in the jaws, cheeks, and tongue.
“The topmost SIX, divided, shows one moving his jaws and tongue.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 6 is the top of the hexagram, the position the line texts have been climbing toward since the toe at line 1. The site of influence is the jaws, cheeks, and tongue — 輔頰舌. There is no judgement attached. The classical commentaries are uniform about what the absence of judgement means: the influence has stopped being a stir in the body and become only talk. The actor is now wooing with the mouth.
The decision-relevant translation is sharp. Line 6 is the line for the courtship that has degraded into persuasion, the deal that has become rhetoric, the recruiting pitch that has overrun the candidate’s real interest. The mouth can be made to say almost anything; what it says no longer carries the weight that the lower-body stirs of lines 1 through 4 carried because it is no longer connected to those stirs. The hexagram does not name this as evil. It names it as the end of mutual influence. The other party will hear talk and recognise that the substance has thinned. For founders, sales leaders, and recruiters the operational reading is to recognise the line-6 condition before the other party does — to step back from the mouth-wooing, return to the centred posture of line 4, and let the silence do the work the talk has stopped doing. Influence that has reached the tongue is influence that needs to be allowed to retreat into the body again.
PostureMutual influence · emptying to receive
Mutual Influence opens the second half of the received Yijing. Where the first half began with Heaven and Earth as the primal pair of generative energies, the second half begins with the relationship pair of Mutual Influence and Duration — attraction first, endurance next. The lower trigram Gen (艮, mountain) carries the youngest son; the upper trigram Dui (兌, lake) carries the youngest daughter. The structural picture is the male principle beneath the female principle, the firm below the yielding, stopping below joy. The Tuan compresses the whole hexagram into one phrase: 柔上而剛下 — the yielding above, the firm below — and names the resulting movement as 二氣感應以相與, the two energies stirring and responding, embracing each other.
The character 咸 matters. In its earliest sense it meant universal, all-encompassing, the whole. The heart radical 心 was added later to produce the modern 感, to feel. The hexagram is therefore not about a particular attraction between two specific parties; it is about the universal grammar of how two parties stir each other into response. The Xiang commentary makes the discipline explicit: 君子以虛受人 — the noble person empties themselves and receives others. The instruction is structural rather than tactical. The receiver of influence must make room. A full vessel cannot be filled; a busy mind cannot be moved; an already-committed posture cannot be courted. Mutual Influence is the hexagram of attraction precisely because it names the emptying that has to come first.
Failure modesRestless thigh (line 3) · jaw and tongue (line 6)
The two dominant failures in Mutual Influence sit at line 3 and line 6. Line 3 — the restless thigh — is the actor who has felt the stir of influence and immediately clamped onto the object of it. The grip distorts the influence; the actor stops being moved and starts trying to hold. In modern terms this is the courtship that becomes pursuit, the partnership conversation that becomes a pre-commitment, the candidate the hiring manager has already mentally hired. The hexagram is explicit that going forward in this posture produces regret. Line 6 — the jaws, cheeks, and tongue — is the parallel failure at the top of the hexagram. The actor has run out of body to be moved in and now persuades only with the mouth. The talk is fluent; the substance has thinned; the other party hears the gap. The corrective for both is the same: return to the centred posture of line 4, and let the centred-ness be the influence the restless body or mouth was trying to perform.
Application & adjacentQuestion shape · Hexagram 32 pair · Calibrating attraction
A note on the question shape this hexagram answers best. Mutual Influence rewards questions framed around the calibration of attraction or persuasion in any direction — a courtship in the early stages, a sales motion that depends on the prospect choosing the actor as much as the actor choosing them, a recruiting conversation with a candidate the company genuinely wants, a partnership negotiation where both parties have to be moved. It is less useful for questions about whether to continue something that has already been established; for that question, re-read with Hexagram 32 — Duration — the structural pair that names the discipline of holding the form long enough to compound. Mutual Influence is the early arc; Duration is the long arc.
The canonical adjacent reading is Hexagram 32 — Duration. The two together open the second half of the received Yijing the way Hexagrams 1 and 2 open the first half. Where 1 and 2 are the primal pair of generative energies, 31 and 32 are the relational pair: attraction first, endurance next. TheXu Gua (序卦傳) makes the sequence explicit: without mutual influence there is nothing to endure; without duration the influence dissipates before it compounds. Founders and operators who keep both hexagrams in view tend to be calibrated about which phase of a relationship they are actually in. The early conversations belong to 31; the maintenance belongs to 32; confusing the two produces the line-3 thigh-grip in the early phase and a brittle, performative posture in the later phase.
The line-by-line walk up the body is the hexagram’s operational discipline. The decision-relevant move is to ask, at each cycle, where in the body the stir has actually arrived. Toe (line 1): notice without acting. Calf (line 2): stay still; do not pursue. Thigh (line 3): drop the grip. Heart (line 4): hold the centred posture; let firm-correctness do the influence. Upper back (line 5): stop reaching; the influence has landed. Mouth (line 6): stop talking and let the influence retreat into the body. The discipline is not to skip rungs. Most failures in mutual influence are the result of an actor whose toe has stirred trying to operate from the mouth.
SynthesisYiGram Editorial
Each Western line of reading approaches Mutual Influence from a different angle. James Legge transliterates 咸 as “Hsien” and frames the hexagram within his Confucian moral lens — courtship done correctly, the firm taking the lower position, the marriage of a young lady as the canonical form of fortunate mutual influence. Richard Wilhelm’s symbolic-philosophical posture reads the hexagram as “Influence (Wooing)” and emphasises the stopping-with-delight pairing of the trigrams as the emotional posture of attraction received without urgency. A reading in the lineage of Carl Jung’s 1949 foreword would treat 31 as a marker of the psychic stir that precedes the integration of an unconscious figure into the conscious posture — the body-part walk-up a topography of how the unconscious enters the conscious self. Bradford Hatcher’s linguistic project (below) returns to the semantic field of 咸 itself — mutuality, symbiosis, eros, valence, the full vocabulary range of attraction and resonance. None of these readings is quoted on this page; the synthesis is YiGram Editorial’s characterization of each tradition’s posture.
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 31 咸, his clusters are:
Mutuality, symbiosis, interactions, convergence, coalition, congress, in concert Sharing, embrace, affinity; persuasion, influence, incentives, interest, affection Complements, healthy combinations, right for each other, compelling fulfillment Congress for mutual purposes, teamwork; coming together, resonating with others Eros, attraction, sensuality, stimulation, prompting, arousal, stirrings, response Common interests, meeting each other’s needs, valence bonding, synergy, dyad
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 31 names a specific working posture: the calibration of mutual attraction at the moment the stir of influence first arrives. The Wings supply the structural reading — mountain below, lake above, the firm beneath the yielding, the two energies stirring and responding, the noble person emptying themselves to receive others. Wang Bi treats the body-part progression as the analytical centre: each line names a specific scope at which the actor either receives the influence correctly or distorts it by acting from the wrong part of the body. Zhu Xi reframes the hexagram around the male-below-female configuration as the structural picture of courtship done correctly — the firm party takes the lower position, which is what makes the attraction mutual rather than coercive. The divinatory manual Bushi Zhengzong reads 31 strictly as the marker for active attraction questions — courtship, partnership, contractual approach — and is explicit that the line cast names the part of the body the influence is currently being received in. The unified posture across all four sources is the same: Mutual Influence is a discipline for receiving attraction at the correct scope, in the correct part of the body, with the emptiness that lets the influence land without distortion.
Yi ZhuanTuan + Xiang · Ten Wings
The Ten Wings are the canonical Confucian commentary stratum embedded in the received Yijing. For Hexagram 31 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: 咸，感也。柔上而剛下，二氣感應以相與，止而說，男下女，是以亨利貞，取女吉也。天地感而萬物化生，聖人感人心而天下和平，觀其所感，而天地萬物之情可見矣。
Mutual Influence: feeling. The yielding above, the firm below — the two energies stir and respond, embracing each other. Stopping with delight; the male below the female — therefore success, advantageous correctness, fortune in taking a wife. Heaven and earth stir and the ten thousand things transform and are born; the sage stirs the human heart and the world is in concord. Observe what is being stirred, and the disposition of heaven, earth, and the ten thousand things can be seen.
Xiang 象傳: 山上有澤，咸。君子以虛受人。
Lake above the mountain — Mutual Influence. The noble person accordingly empties themselves and receives others.
The Tuan does the structural work. The firm-below / yielding-above configuration is what makes the influence mutual rather than one-directional, and the stopping-with-delight pairing of the trigrams (Gen stops, Dui delights) is the canonical picture of attraction received without urgency. The Wing extends the reading cosmologically: the same stirring that makes a courtship possible also makes the world’s transformations possible. The Xiang compresses the practical instruction to four characters: 虛受人 — empty oneself and receive others — treating emptiness as the structural precondition for mutual influence. Translations by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese.
Classical commentariesWang Bi · Zhu Xi · Bushi Zhengzong
Wang Bi (Zhouyi Zhu, 3rd century) treats the body-part progression as the analytical centre of the hexagram. For Wang Bi the line texts are not metaphorical but topographical: each line names a specific scope at which the actor is currently registering the influence, and the fortune or misfortune of the line follows from whether the actor acts at the correct scope. The toe at line 1, the calves at line 2, the thighs at line 3, the heart at line 4, the upper back at line 5, the mouth at line 6 — the hexagram’s decision logic, in Wang Bi’s reading, is the precise mapping of where the influence has arrived versus where the actor is trying to operate from.
Zhu Xi (Zhouyi Benyi, 1188) reframes the hexagram around the male-below-female configuration as the structural picture of courtship done correctly. For Zhu Xi the firm party taking the lower position is what makes the attraction mutual rather than coercive; the yielding party above is what makes the influence received rather than imposed. The line 4 instruction — firm-correctness produces fortune and regret vanishes — concentrates the hexagram’s ethical centre at the heart line, while the line 6 mouth-wooing is the canonical picture of influence that has lost its substance.
The Bushi Zhengzong (Qing-dynasty divinatory manual, 1709) reads 31 practically: a hexagram drawn in answer to a question about an active courtship, sales approach, recruiting conversation, or partnership negotiation — any situation in which the actor’s success depends on the other party being moved as well. The manual is explicit that 31 is not a commentary on whether the attraction is appropriate; the cast applies whether the actor is the wooer or the wooed. The practical recommendation tracks the line position the question lands at: notice without acting at line 1; stay still at line 2; drop the grip at line 3; hold the centred posture at line 4; stop reaching at line 5; stop talking at line 6.
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: Dui (metal), third generation (三世). Binary, bottom-up: 001110. Lower trigram: Gen (mountain). Upper trigram: Dui (lake). Shi line: 3. Ying line: 6.
The line branches, bottom-up, follow the Gen-below / Dui-above najia composition for Mutual Influence: 辰 (line 1), 午 (line 2), 申 (line 3), 亥 (line 4), 酉 (line 5), 未 (line 6). Read against the Dui palace, whose element is metal, the six-relatives assignments are: line 1 辰 (earth) — parents (父母); line 2 午 (fire) — officials (官鬼); line 3 申 (metal) — siblings (兄弟); line 4 亥 (water) — offspring (子孫); line 5 酉 (metal) — siblings (兄弟); line 6 未 (earth) — parents (父母).
The shi line at position 3 carries siblings (申, metal), the same element as the Dui palace itself — the actor stands in a position structurally identical to the palace’s own nature, which is the najia correlate of the line-3 grip warning: the actor whose element matches the palace is the one most likely to mistake the palace’s own attraction for possession of it. The ying line at position 6 carries parents (未, earth), the element that generates the palace’s own metal. Read as a structural pair, the shi-ying axis of Mutual Influence says that the actor stands at the body’s thigh while the receiving position sits at the jaws and tongue — the najia echo of the body-part walk-up that the line texts themselves perform.
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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