Hexagram 51震Thunder
Shock arrives and the question is whether the work you were already doing survives it. The practical instruction is not bravery but composure — keep the ritual going, do not drop the wine cup, do not let the interruption become the new subject.
60-second read
Thunder names the moment a sudden shock interrupts work that was already underway. The hexagram statement is not about the shock; it is about the actor who, hearing the crash that terrifies everyone within a hundred miles, continues the ritual without dropping the ladle. The pattern repeats: shock arrives, the person responds with composed laughter (“ha ha”), shock arrives again, the work continues. The fortune is conditional on the composure being real — not performed — and on the underlying work being substantial enough to be worth not interrupting. The interruption is not the test. The continuity of what you were already doing is the test.
The hexagram
震：亨。震來虩虩，笑言啞啞。震驚百里，不喪匕鬯。
Thunder: success. When the shock arrives, watchful and apprehensive; afterwards, laughing and talking, ha ha. The shock startles for a hundred miles, yet the ladle and the ritual wine are not dropped. — Translation by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese
“Kan gives the intimation of ease and development. When (the time of) movement (which it indicates) comes, (the subject of the hexagram) will be found looking out with apprehension, and yet smiling and talking cheerfully. When the movement (like a crash of thunder) terrifies all within a hundred li, he will be (like the sincere worshipper) who is not (startled into) letting go his ladle and (cup of) sacrificial spirits.”
— 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.
震來虩虩，後笑言啞啞，吉。
The shock arrives — watchful, apprehensive. Afterwards, laughing and talking, ha ha. Fortunate.
“The first NINE, undivided, shows its subject, when the movement approaches, looking out and around with apprehension, and afterwards smiling and talking cheerfully. There will be good fortune.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 1 is the position from which the whole hexagram is read. The actor hears the first roll of thunder, attends carefully — 虩虩 carries the image of a gecko watching, alert without being startled — and then, when the immediate danger has passed, returns to laughter and ordinary speech. The line names a specific posture for the moment a shock first arrives: full attention, no flinch, and a deliberate return to baseline as soon as the attention is no longer required. The fortune the line names is the fortune of an actor who is not, by temperament, swept away.
In a decision context this is the line that tests whether you can receive an interruption without restructuring around it. A market announcement breaks your week. A competitor's move arrives mid-quarter. A health scare interrupts an arc you had been working on for years. Line 1 is explicit: the watchful pause is correct; the post-interruption return to ordinary speech is also correct. What the line refuses is the middle posture — the actor who stays in the apprehension after the shock has finished, treating the interruption as ongoing when it has actually passed. That posture turns one shock into a permanent operating mode.
A practical test for whether you are reading line 1 well: ask whether, twenty-four hours after the shock, the language you are using to describe your work has become primarily about the shock. If yes, the line's second clause has not landed for you. The laughter-and-talking phase is not denial of the event; it is a refusal to let the event become the subject. The discipline is to acknowledge the thunder fully, take what action the attention demands, and then return — actually return — to the work the thunder interrupted.
震來厲，億喪貝。躋于九陵，勿逐，七日得。
The shock arrives with danger. Estimates lose the cowrie shells. Climb to the ninefold heights — do not pursue. In seven days they return.
“The second SIX, divided, shows its subject, when the movement approaches, in a position of peril. He judges it better to let go the articles (in his possession), and to ascend a very lofty height. There is no occasion for him to pursue the things he has let go; in seven days he will find them.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 2 is the line that names the specific instruction for the second-arrival of the shock, when the actor is already in motion and the shock now puts assets at risk. The cowrie shells — 貝 — are the line's image of small portable wealth: the inventory, the working capital, the immediate-term assets that move with the actor. The instruction is to let them go. Not negotiate, not protect, not pursue. Climb to the ninefold heights — a high refuge — and wait the cycle out. In seven days they return.
The line's confidence is unusual. Most Yijing lines that involve loss treat the loss as conditional on the actor's later action. This line treats the loss as a temporary displacement that will reverse on its own if the actor refuses to chase it. The structural picture is that the shock is a wave passing through a system the actor is part of. If the actor stands still on high ground, the wave passes and the displaced material returns to its prior arrangement. If the actor pursues the displaced material into the wave, the actor is themselves displaced.
For decision-makers caught in a second-arrival shock — a downturn that hits while a transaction was already mid-flight, a regulatory change that lands mid-quarter, a personnel departure that happens in the middle of an active project — the line is precise about the instruction. Do not chase what the shock has dislodged. Move to elevated ground: pause the activity, defend the actor, wait the seven-day cycle. The line is explicit that the return is not contingent on pursuit. Many of the assets the second shock dislodges come back when the field cools, and the actor who refused to chase is the one in position to receive them.
震蘇蘇，震行無眚。
Shock leaves you trembling and disoriented. If the shock prompts movement, there is no misfortune.
“The third SIX, divided, shows its subject distraught amid the startling movements going on. If those movements excite him to (right) action, there will be no mistake.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 3 is the line of the actor who is genuinely shaken — 蘇蘇 carries the sense of revival from a faint, the tremor of someone who was not ready for what arrived — and the line's instruction is unusually mild. It does not require composure on arrival. It requires that the shock translate into movement rather than into paralysis. The fortune of the line is conditional on the disorientation actually producing an action, even an imperfect one.
This is the line that admits not every actor occupies the composed posture of line 1. For most people in most shocks, the first response is genuine destabilization. The hexagram does not punish that. What it warns against is the disoriented actor who stays still — neither processes the shock into composure nor channels it into movement. The combination of tremor plus paralysis is what produces compounding loss; the tremor plus a corrective action is what the line specifies as the safe path.
For decision-makers this is the practical line for the non-stoic actor. If your honest response to a shock is to tremble — if your hands shake on the steering wheel or your speech catches mid-sentence — do not pretend otherwise, and do not freeze. Move. The movement does not have to be the perfect response; it has to be a real one. Place a call. Send the note. Change the schedule. The line’s 無眚 — no misfortune — is granted to the disoriented actor who keeps acting, not to the composed actor who never wavered. Most readers are line 3, not line 1, and the hexagram is realistic about it.
震遂泥。
Shock — and then sinking into the mud.
“The fourth NINE, undivided, shows its subject, amid the startling movements, supinely sinking (deeper) in the mud.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 4 is the shortest line text in the hexagram and the bluntest warning. Four characters: shock, and then sinking into the mud. There is no fortune named, no action prescribed, no consolation. The line names the failure that lines 1 through 3 are working against: the actor whose response to a shock is to settle deeper into the situation that produced the shock, mistaking the heaviness for grounding.
The structural cause is recognisable. Line 4 sits at the bottom of the upper trigram — the first position where the wider world can see the actor's response — and the temptation at this position is to perform stability by becoming immobile. The performance reads, from outside, as composure; from inside, it is paralysis dressed as steadiness. The mud thickens. Movement becomes harder. The next shock will find the actor in a worse position than the first one did. This is the specific failure mode the hexagram is most concerned with, because it disguises itself as a virtue.
For decision-makers the line names a common post-crisis pattern. An executive responds to a market shock by holding every existing commitment in place, calling the holding “discipline.” A founder responds to a personnel shock by refusing to renegotiate any role, calling the refusal “losyalty.” A leader responds to a public crisis by repeating the prior message word-for-word, calling the repetition “consistency.” Each is the same mistake: shock arrived, the actor settled into the mud rather than maintaining the ongoing work. The corrective is not new action invented in response to the shock; it is the resumption of the work the shock interrupted, the work line 1 named. Sinking is not steadiness. The line is unambiguous about that.
震往來厲，億無喪，有事。
Shock comes and goes with danger. Estimates show no loss; there is work to be done.
“The fifth SIX, divided, shows its subject going and coming amidst the startling movements (of the time), and always in peril; but perhaps he will not incur loss, and find business (which he can accomplish).”
— Legge (1882)
Line 5 is the ruling position and the line where the hexagram's drama becomes a steady operating state rather than a single event. 震往來 — shock comes and shock goes. The actor at this position has stopped treating the interruptions as exceptional and has begun treating them as the ambient conditions in which the work happens. The danger is real and the actor names it; the assessment is that nothing essential has been lost; the remaining sentence is the line's compressed instruction: 有事 — there is work to do.
The unusual feature of line 5 is its refusal to romanticise the situation. The shocks are dangerous. The actor is not pretending otherwise. But the inventory keeps coming out balanced — 億無喪, the estimates show no loss — because the work itself is what the actor is protecting, not the absence of shock. The line names a maturity that lines 1 and 2 prepared for: composure under conditions where composure is no longer a single test but an everyday discipline. Most decision-makers who occupy this position arrived at it slowly, line by line, not by being temperamentally calm but by having developed a working practice that interruptions cannot dislodge.
The practical translation for line 5 is the recognition that long arcs operate under recurring shocks rather than at their absence. The right question is not “how do I prevent the next interruption” but “what is the work whose continuity I am defending across this whole season.” Founders who lead through extended turbulence often describe a version of this posture: each crisis is acknowledged, each crisis is real, each crisis fails to displace the underlying program. 有事 is the operating word. The work continues because the work is what the line treats as the actor's actual position, and the shocks are weather passing through it.
震索索，視矍矍，征凶。震不于其躬，于其鄰，無咎。婚媾有言。
Shock reduces you to trembling; the gaze is wild and darting. Going forward brings misfortune. The shock did not reach your own body but landed on your neighbour — no fault. The marriage party will have words.
“The sixth SIX, divided, shows one discomposed amid the startling movements (of the time), and looking around him with trembling apprehension. Action on his part will be evil. If the movements had not reached his own person, but only affected his neighbours, there would have been no error, but his relatives would (still) speak against him.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 6 is the top line and the most particularised failure mode in the hexagram. The actor is discomposed and the gaze itself has lost its centre — 視矍矍 is the wild darting look of someone whose attention can no longer settle. The instruction is plain: 征凶, going forward brings misfortune. Acting outward from this state will only widen the damage. The line is the explicit corrective for the actor who would compound a personal shock by reaching for an external response before the inner state has stabilised.
The second half of the line introduces a precise distinction. 震不于其躬，于其鄰 — the shock did not reach the actor's own body; it landed on a neighbour. The actor is responding to a shock that is technically not theirs to act on, and the line clarifies that the absence of personal injury is itself a kind of permission to refrain. There is no fault in not acting when the event is structurally adjacent rather than central. The actor's instinct to intervene on behalf of the neighbour, in the discomposed state line 6 names, is what produces the misfortune the line warns against.
The final clause is the human note: 婚媾有言, the marriage party will have words. Even when the actor's refusal to act is structurally correct, the actor's intimates — the people closest enough to feel the second-order vibration of the neighbour's shock — will object. The line is explicit that this objection is not a sign of error. The relatives' words are normal, and the actor's correct response is not to over-explain. Hold the refusal; allow the words; do not act forward into the misfortune the gaze is already warning about. Line 6's discipline is the discipline of an actor who recognizes that not every shock in the field is the actor's to absorb, and who has the composure to receive the criticism that comes with the correct restraint.
PostureShock as the test of ongoing work · composure not bravery
The hexagram is built from a single trigram doubled — 震 below and 震 above — and the doubling is load-bearing. One thunderclap is an event; two thunderclaps are a season. The hexagram is not describing the rare crisis that disturbs an otherwise quiet life. It is describing a stretch of time in which shocks arrive, recur, and continue to recur, and the actor’s work has to continue inside them. The fortune the statement names — 亨, success — is the success of an actor whose composure outlasts the noise rather than the actor who managed to avoid the noise.
The hexagram statement’s memorable image is the worshipper who does not drop the ladle and the wine cup. The ritual was already underway when the thunder struck. The instruction is that the ritual continues. Not because the worshipper is unmoved — the text is explicit about the apprehensive looking-out — but because the work being performed is more substantial than the interruption arriving at it. The structural lesson is unsentimental: composure under shock is not a personality trait. It is a function of whether the work you were doing had enough weight to be worth not interrupting. Actors whose ongoing work is thin drop the ladle the first time the room shakes. Actors whose work is substantial keep their hands steady.
What makes Thunder different from Difficulty, Constraint, or Obstruction is the specific orientation it asks for. You are not solving the shock. You are not negotiating with it. You are continuing the prior work through it, with full acknowledgement that the shock is real. Line 1 names the composed response. Line 2 names the disciplined refusal to chase displaced assets. Line 3 admits the disoriented actor and instructs them to keep moving. Line 4 warns against settling into the mud. Line 5 names the mature operating state where shocks come and go without dislodging the work. Line 6 specifies the discipline of restraint when the shock is adjacent rather than central. The arc is consistent: the ongoing work is the thing, and the discipline is to keep it continuous.
Failure modesSinking in the mud (line 4) · discomposed gaze (line 6)
Two failure modes cluster around this hexagram and both follow from misreading the relationship between shock and work. The first is the line-4 pattern: 震遂泥, shock and then sinking into the mud. The actor responds to the interruption by holding every existing commitment more rigidly, calling the rigidity steadiness. From outside the posture looks composed. From inside the actor has stopped moving, and the next shock will find them less mobile than the first one did. The line is explicit that this is not the discipline the hexagram is naming. The discipline is continuing the work, not freezing in place.
The second failure mode is the line-6 pattern: 震索索，視矍矍, the trembling state with the wild darting gaze, followed by an attempt to act outward anyway. The actor, internally destabilised, reaches for an external response — often on behalf of a third party who was the actual subject of the shock — and the action compounds the disorder. The hexagram’s instruction is to refrain. Not every shock in the field is the actor’s to absorb; not every neighbour’s shock requires the actor’s intervention. The discomposed gaze is the diagnostic. If the gaze cannot settle, the action will be wrong. Hold position. Receive the criticism that comes with the restraint. Resume the work when the gaze steadies.
Application & adjacentQuestion shape · Hexagram 52 pair · Eight pure trigrams family
A note on the question shape this hexagram answers best. Thunder rewards questions framed around how to handle an interruption that has already arrived or is clearly about to arrive — a market shock mid-quarter, a personnel departure mid-project, a personal crisis mid-arc, a public reversal mid-campaign. It is less useful for questions about whether to take a deliberate action that will itself produce a shock; for that question, read Hexagram 17 — Following — or Hexagram 43 — Breakthrough. The Cauldron's territory is the post-overthrow consolidation work; Thunder's territory is what to do when the shock arrives without your authorship.
The canonical adjacent reading is Hexagram 52 — Mountain (艮 Gen) — and the two form an explicit pair in the received Yijing sequence. Thunder is arousal; Mountain is cessation. Thunder is the trigram that breaks the stillness; Mountain is the trigram that holds it. Reading Thunder without Mountain tends to produce actors who treat every situation as a shock to be metabolised, without ever recognising the seasons that ask for cessation. Reading Mountain without Thunder produces actors who hold position past the moment when the shock has actually arrived and continued movement is required. The pair tells a complete arc: receive the shock without dropping the ladle (51); know when to stop completely (52). Decisions inside high-volatility windows are most accurate when both hexagrams are kept in view.
Thunder is also one of the eight hexagrams in the pure-trigram family — the hexagrams formed by doubling a single trigram — alongside H1 (乾 Heaven), H2 (坤 Earth), H29 (坎 Abyss), H30 (離 Clarity), H52 (艮 Mountain), H57 (巽 Gentle Wind), and H58 (兌 Joy). The pure-trigram hexagrams have an unusual structural feature: their meaning is the meaning of the trigram itself, amplified rather than modified. Reading Thunder benefits from holding the trigram’s plain meaning in view — sudden movement, the eldest son, the arousing — without expecting the hexagram to soften or complicate it.
Thunder is also unusually demanding about the actor's own substrate. The hexagram does not reference trust the way Revolution does; it does not reference casting competence the way the Cauldron does. It references composure, which is a function of the actor's prior preparation. The ladle is held steady because the worshipper had been practicing the ritual long enough that the muscle memory survived the thunder. For decision-makers post-shock this means the relevant variable is what work you had already established before the shock arrived. If the prior work was substantial, line 5's operating state — shocks come and go, the work continues — is available to you. If the prior work was thin, the line-4 mud will pull you under, and no amount of in-the-moment composure will substitute for the substance you did not build in the season before.
SynthesisYiGram Editorial
Each Western line of reading approaches Thunder from a different angle. James Legge translates 震 as “Kan” — an early-Victorian transliteration that does not map to modern pinyin — and frames the hexagram within his Confucian moral lens: the sincere worshipper who, hearing the thunderclap that terrifies all within a hundred li, does not drop the ladle of sacrificial spirits. For Legge the hexagram is centrally about the ritualist’s composure under divine signal. Richard Wilhelm’s symbolic-philosophical posture renders the hexagram as “The Arousing (Shock, Thunder)” and reads it as the great image of sudden movement that wakes the world from torpor — the eldest son trigram doubled, the generative spark that initiates new motion. A reading in the lineage of Carl Jung’s 1949 foreword would treat Thunder as a marker of sudden psychic intrusion — the moment the unconscious breaks through into ordinary consciousness with enough force to reorganise the field, requiring the ego to absorb the arrival without disintegrating. Bradford Hatcher’s linguistic project (below) abandons all three framings and returns to the semantic field of 震 itself — stimulus and response, action and reaction, the raw energy of arousal, the startle reflex and its resolution into mastery. 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 51 震, his clusters are:
Stimulus & response, action & reaction, motive & motion; reaction into response Shake up, provocation; suddenness, surge, raw energy, net motive force, arousal The unexpected, novelty, surprise, startle reflex; repercussion, resounding, retort Awakening, quickening, exhilaration, invigoration, challenge, motivation, starting Mastery, maturity, experience, getting one’s grip, composure, attunement, aplomb Nimbleness, resilience; hunting, capturing & using ambient energy; taking charge
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 51 names a very specific posture: composure under repeated shock, with the fortune conditional not on the shock’s absence but on the continuity of the work the shock interrupted. The Wings give the canonical reading: the apprehension is itself generative — 恐致福, fear leads to fortune — because the alert state is what allows the noble person to emerge with the capacity to guard the ancestral shrines and serve as master of sacrifices. The Xiang compresses the whole hexagram into a six-character instruction: 君子以恐懼修省 — the noble person, in fear and trembling, refines and examines themselves. Wang Bi sharpens the structural reading: the doubled 震 trigram is not redundancy but iteration, and the hexagram is naming the discipline of an actor who can absorb a second arrival without the composure earned in the first one dissolving. Zhu Xi reframes the hexagram around 慎獨 — carefulness in solitude — and stresses that the self-examination the Xiang names happens in private; the public composure is only durable if the inward refinement is already underway. The divinatory manual Bushi Zhengzong reads 51 strictly as a marker for moments of sudden interruption in ongoing work — not a license to authored disruption, and not a signal of catastrophe. The unified posture across all four sources is the same: Thunder is a discipline for keeping the prior work continuous through interruptions whose only durable cure is the composure built in the seasons before the thunder arrived.
Yi ZhuanTuan + Xiang · Ten Wings
The Ten Wings are the canonical Confucian commentary stratum embedded in the received Yijing. For Hexagram 51 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: 震，亨。震來虩虩，恐致福也。笑言啞啞，後有則也。震驚百里，驚遠而懼邇也。出可以守宗廟社稷，以為祭主也。
Thunder, success. “The shock arrives, watchful and apprehensive” — fear leads to fortune. “Laughing and talking, ha ha” — afterwards there is a rule. “The shock startles for a hundred miles” — startling the far and frightening the near. The one who emerges can guard the ancestral shrines and the altars of soil and grain, and serve as master of sacrifices.
Xiang 象傳: 洊雷，震。君子以恐懼修省。
Successive thunder — Thunder. The noble person accordingly, in fear and trembling, refines and examines themselves.
The Tuan does the political-ritual work: it names the generative function of apprehension — the fear is what produces the fortune, not what blocks it — and identifies the figure who emerges from the shock as the one fit to guard the ancestral shrines and preside over sacrifice. The image fuses two registers — near-fear and far-startlement — that the actor inside the hexagram must hold together. The Xiang does the ethical-operational work: when the image of successive thunder is recognized, the noble person’s correct response is not bravery and not stoicism but self-examination under fear and trembling. The response to repeated shock is inward, not outward. The hexagram’s decision logic is compressed into that six-character instruction. Translations by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese.
Classical commentariesWang Bi · Zhu Xi · Bushi Zhengzong
Wang Bi (Zhouyi Zhu, 3rd century) reads 51 as a hexagram whose meaning depends on the iteration of the trigram rather than on any single line. The doubled 震 is the structural fact: a shock that arrives is not the hexagram’s subject; a shock that arrives and arrives again, with the actor still in motion between them, is. Wang Bi’s reading concentrates on lines 1 and 4 as a contrasting pair — the composed yang at the bottom that receives the shock and returns to ordinary speech, versus the unstable yang at line 4 that settles into the mud and confuses heaviness with steadiness. For Wang Bi the difference between the two lines is the difference between composure as an active discipline and immobility as a passive one; the hexagram’s fortune is conditional on the active reading.
Zhu Xi (Zhouyi Benyi, 1188) reframes the hexagram around 慎獨 — the Confucian discipline of carefulness in solitude — and reads the Xiang’s instruction to refine and examine oneself in fear and trembling as a precise description of the inward work that the public composure of the hexagram statement makes possible. The worshipper does not drop the ladle because the worshipper has, in the seasons before the thunder, practiced the ritual under conditions where the examination of the self was already constant. Zhu Xi is explicit that the hexagram’s posture cannot be summoned in the moment of shock; it is the harvest of preparation in less dramatic seasons.
The Bushi Zhengzong (Qing-dynasty divinatory manual, 1709) reads 51 practically: a hexagram drawn in answer to a question about how to handle an interruption that has arrived or is clearly arriving in ongoing work — a market shock, a relational shock, a sudden positional change — rather than as a marker for catastrophe or as a license for authored disruption. The manual is explicit that 51 does not signal disaster; the hexagram’s territory is the composed response to shock, not the shock’s severity. For questions about whether to take a deliberate action that will itself produce a shock, the manual instructs the reader to re-read against Hexagram 17 (Following) or Hexagram 43 (Breakthrough) rather than treating 51 as a license for disruption.
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: Zhen (wood). Generation: Native (本卦, 0世). Binary, bottom-up: 100100. Lower trigram: Zhen (thunder). Upper trigram: Zhen (thunder). Shi line: 6. Ying line: 3.
The line branches, bottom-up, follow the pure-Zhen palace najia composition for Thunder: 子 (line 1), 寅 (line 2), 辰 (line 3), 午 (line 4), 申 (line 5), 戌 (line 6). Read against the Zhen palace, whose element is wood, the six-relatives assignments are: line 1 子 (water) — parents (父母, water generates wood); line 2 寅 (wood) — siblings (兄弟, same as palace); line 3 辰 (earth) — wealth (妻財, wood restrains earth); line 4 午 (fire) — offspring (子孫, wood generates fire); line 5 申 (metal) — officer-ghost (官鬼, metal restrains wood); line 6 戌 (earth) — wealth (妻財).
The shi line at position 6 carries wealth (戌, earth), the element that the Zhen palace’s own wood restrains. The ying line at position 3 also carries wealth (辰, earth). Read as a structural pair, the shi-ying axis of Thunder says that the actor stands at the top of the hexagram, holding the palace’s restraining position against the wealth it controls, while the receiving position at line 3 holds the same relationship from below. As a Native-generation (本卦) pure-trigram hexagram, the shi and ying both rest on the same type of restrained material, an unusual structural fact that mirrors the hexagram’s doubled trigram: the actor and the receiver are facing the same kind of shock from opposite ends.
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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