EN (English)
䷚
Hexagram 27 of 64
Nourishment
頤 · Yí
The figure looks like a jaw: solid lines top and bottom, open in between. The hexagram is about nourishment in every sense, including what you say and what you consume.
nourishment
speech
what you take in
self-care
- King Wen number
- 27 of 64
- Above
- ☶ Gèn · Mountain
- Below
- ☳ Zhèn · Thunder
- Composition
- Mountain over Thunder
- Lines, bottom to top
- Solid · broken · broken · broken · broken · solid
- Chinese
- 頤 · Yí
The Judgment
Steadfastness brings good fortune. Watch how nourishment is provided, and what a person seeks to fill their own mouth with.
Two questions rather than one: how you are fed, and what you go looking for. The classic thinks the second reveals more.
The Image
Thunder at the foot of the mountain: Nourishment. So the noble person is careful with words and temperate in eating and drinking.
The mouth does both jobs, and the hexagram treats them as one discipline. What comes out is governed alongside what goes in.
What it means
Yi is a picture of an open mouth, and it is the classic's hexagram about intake. Two firm lines at top and bottom, four open ones between: something that can be filled.
Its Judgment asks two things. Watch how nourishment is provided, meaning look at the arrangements you depend on, and watch what someone seeks to put in their own mouth, which the classic treats as the more revealing question. What a person reaches for when nobody is arranging it for them says what they are.
The Image extends the mouth to speech, and this is the part that has outlived the rest. Careful words and moderate eating are one discipline in this hexagram, governed at the same aperture.
The lines sort dependence into good and bad forms, mostly by direction and honesty. The first has someone abandoning their own sacred tortoise, a source of insight and self-sufficiency, to gape at what someone else has. The third refuses nourishment outright and gets a decade-long prohibition. The fourth wants intensely, openly, with a tiger's stare, and receives no blame at all. The top line stops asking who feeds you and asks whom you feed.
In a reading
Nourishment as an answer asks what you are taking in: food, information, company, work, attention. The hexagram is about sources rather than events.
Its counsel is to look honestly at what sustains you and what you reach for when unsupervised, and to apply the same care to what you say. If the question involves depending on someone, the difference between the second and fourth lines is whether the dependence is openly acknowledged.
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.
-
Nine at the top
The source of nourishment. Aware of the danger, good fortune. It helps to cross the great water.
Being the one who feeds others. The responsibility is named as a danger, and the line is still the best in the hexagram.
-
Six in the fifth place
Leaving the path. Staying steady brings good fortune. One should not cross the great water.
Unconventional means, tolerated on condition that nothing ambitious is attempted with them.
-
Six in the fourth place
Turning upward for nourishment brings good fortune. Watching with a tiger's fixed stare, wanting and wanting. No blame.
The same upward dependence as the second line, now legitimate. The hunger is intense and the text does not condemn it.
-
Six in the third place
Turning away from nourishment. Steadfastness brings misfortune. Do not act this way for ten years. Nothing furthers.
Refusing what actually feeds you. The harshest text in the hexagram, with a ten-year prohibition attached.
-
Six in the second place
Turning upward for food, leaving the path, seeking nourishment on the hill. To go on brings misfortune.
Dependence pointed in the wrong direction, and pursued past the point where it makes sense.
-
Nine at the beginning
You leave your sacred tortoise and look at me with your mouth hanging open. Misfortune.
Abandoning your own source of nourishment out of envy for someone else's.
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