EN (English)
䷞
Hexagram 31 of 64
Influence
咸 · Xián
A lake resting in a hollow at the top of a mountain, the youngest daughter above the youngest son. The hexagram of mutual attraction, and the classic's most bodily figure.
attraction
courtship
mutual feeling
receptivity
- King Wen number
- 31 of 64
- Above
- ☱ Duì · Lake
- Below
- ☶ Gèn · Mountain
- Composition
- Lake over Mountain
- Lines, bottom to top
- Broken · broken · solid · solid · solid · broken
- Chinese
- 咸 · Xián
The Judgment
Success. It rewards holding to the course. Taking a wife brings good fortune.
The classic's plainest endorsement of a match. Attraction here is well-founded and worth acting on.
The Image
A lake on the mountain: Influence. So the noble person draws people near by being empty enough to receive them.
Emptiness as the mechanism. The hollow in the mountaintop is what lets the lake exist at all.
What it means
Xian is the hexagram that opens the second half of the classic, and its subject is attraction. A lake sits in the hollow at a mountain's summit, and the two trigrams are the youngest daughter and the youngest son: courtship in structural form.
The six lines run up a human body from the big toe to the tongue, which is the only sustained anatomical sequence in the book. The lower lines are involuntary. A toe twitches, the calves want to move before anything has been decided, the thighs simply follow whatever they are attached to. The classic's verdicts get less friendly as the response gets stronger and remains unexamined.
The fourth line is the hexagram's real subject. It sits where the heart would be, and it says that influence exercised through restless calculation reaches only the people you consciously calculate about. Genuine attraction works more widely than that, and it works by receptivity, which the Image locates in emptiness: the hollow in the mountaintop is what allows the lake.
At the top, influence has climbed into the jaws and tongue. It has become talk, and the text pointedly declines to say whether that is good.
In a reading
Influence as an answer concerns mutual attraction: a relationship, a partnership, a proposal, a connection forming between two parties.
It is favourable and it asks for restraint at the lower end and openness at the upper. Do not act on the first physical impulse, do not simply follow what you are drawn to, and make room rather than making a case. The hexagram's warning is against attraction that has turned entirely into persuasion.
The six lines
Read a line's text only when the cast made it a moving line. They are listed from the top of the figure down, the way the hexagram is drawn.
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Six at the top
The influence shows in the jaws, cheeks and tongue.
Attraction that has become talk. The text offers no verdict, which the commentaries read as verdict enough.
-
Nine in the fifth place
The influence shows in the back of the neck. No regret.
Above the heart and out of sight. Firmness of will that is not swayed and does not persuade anyone either.
-
Nine in the fourth place
Steadfastness brings good fortune and regret disappears. If your thoughts go restlessly to and fro, only the friends you consciously think of will follow.
The hexagram's centre, and the heart's own line. Influence exerted deliberately reaches only as far as the deliberation does.
-
Nine in the third place
The influence shows in the thighs, holding to whatever it follows. To go on is humiliating.
Being carried along by attraction with no judgement applied to it.
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Six in the second place
The influence shows in the calves. Misfortune. Staying put brings good fortune.
The legs want to move before the rest has decided. The line says do not follow them yet.
-
Six at the beginning
The influence shows in the big toe.
The first stirring, too small to act on and impossible not to notice.
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