EN (English)
䷸
Hexagram 57 of 64
The Gentle
巽 · Xùn
Wind following wind. The hexagram is about penetrating influence: the mild, persistent pressure that reaches everywhere, and the point at which mildness becomes a fault.
influence
persistence
gentleness
gradual effect
- King Wen number
- 57 of 64
- Above
- ☴ Xùn · Wind
- Below
- ☴ Xùn · Wind
- Composition
- Wind over Wind
- Lines, bottom to top
- Broken · solid · solid · broken · solid · solid
- Chinese
- 巽 · Xùn
The Judgment
Success through what is small. It helps to have somewhere to go. It helps to see the great person.
Small success, and a direction. Gentle influence needs an aim, or it is only a draught.
The Image
Winds following one another: the Gentle. So the noble person repeats their instructions and carries the work through.
Repetition is the mechanism. An instruction given once has been announced; an instruction given repeatedly has been established.
What it means
Xun doubled is influence rather than force. Wind gets in through every gap, not by pushing harder but by having no shape of its own, and the classic uses it for anything that works gradually and from underneath: persuasion, policy, habit, culture.
The Image identifies the method exactly. Repeat your instructions and carry the work through. A thing said once has been announced; a thing said many times has become part of the furniture. This is not rhetorical advice, it is a description of how anything actually takes hold.
The hexagram is honest about the failure mode, and it is the one you would expect. The third line has repeated penetration and calls it humiliating: going over the same ground endlessly instead of deciding. The top line has the same search as the second, now carried so far that the property and the axe are gone. Gentleness pursued without limit stops being influence and becomes evasion.
Against those sits the fifth line, one of the most complete in the book. No beginning but an end, three days of preparation before the change and three of consolidation after. A poor start, handled properly, finishing well.
In a reading
The Gentle as an answer favours indirect, repeated, patient influence over any decisive move. The effect will be real and it will be slow.
Its counsel is to have a clear aim and to keep applying mild pressure toward it. The warning is against the same behaviour without an aim: if you have gone over this ground more than twice without deciding anything, the third line is describing you.
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
Penetration under the bed. He loses his property and his axe. Steadfastness brings misfortune.
The same search as the second line, taken too far. Investigation that has consumed the means of acting.
-
Nine in the fifth place
Steadfastness brings good fortune, regret disappears, nothing that does not further. No beginning, but an end. Three days before the turning point, three days after. Good fortune.
A change made properly: prepared beforehand, consolidated after. The bad start is redeemed by the handling.
-
Six in the fourth place
Regret disappears. Three kinds of game are taken in the hunt.
The one abundant line. Gentle method applied with a clear aim, and it produces on every level.
-
Nine in the third place
Repeated penetration. Humiliation.
Going over the same ground again and again without deciding. Deliberation that has become a substitute for action.
-
Nine in the second place
Penetration under the bed. Priests and diviners are employed in numbers. Good fortune, no blame.
Searching out what is hidden underneath, thoroughly and with help. The excess of effort is approved.
-
Six at the beginning
Advancing and retreating. The steadiness of a soldier rewards.
Wavering at the bottom. The remedy prescribed is discipline, which is the opposite of the trigram's own nature.
Related figures
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