EN (English)
䷁
Hexagram 2 of 64
The Receptive
坤 · Kūn
The complement of hexagram 1, made entirely of yin lines. Kūn is capacity: the earth that bears everything set on it, and the strength that lies in following the right thing.
receptivity
support
devotion
capacity
- King Wen number
- 2 of 64
- Above
- ☷ Kūn · Earth
- Below
- ☷ Kūn · Earth
- Composition
- Earth over Earth
- Lines, bottom to top
- Broken · broken · broken · broken · broken · broken
- Chinese
- 坤 · Kūn
The Judgment
The source. It gets through. It rewards the steadiness of a mare. If the noble person sets out, they first go astray and later find the way. Gain in the southwest, loss of friends in the northeast. Rest in steadiness. Good fortune.
A mare, not a stallion: strength that runs under harness. The going astray comes from leading when the situation asked you to follow.
The Image
The earth's condition is receptive devotion. So the noble person carries the world with a broad character.
Breadth of character is treated as load-bearing capacity. You can only carry what you have made yourself large enough to hold.
What it means
Kūn is the other half of the book's founding pair, and the classic is careful not to make it the lesser half. Six open lines describe a capacity rather than an absence: earth carrying mountains, a field turning a seed into a harvest, a person large enough to take on what has been handed to them.
The Judgment's mare sets the tone. A mare is not weak, but it runs in harness and in company, and the strength being described is the strength of sustained service rather than of command. The classic then makes the practical point that matters most: this hexagram goes wrong when it leads. Setting out on your own initiative here means losing the road first and finding it later, at cost.
The lines run from the famous frost underfoot, which is the book's model of reading small signals early, up to dragons fighting in the meadow, where yielding has pushed past its own nature and turned into a war. Between them sit the quietest good lines in the classic: unforced correctness, uncredited work, the yellow garment worn under everything else.
Read alongside hexagram 1, the pair make the book's basic claim. Direction without substance goes nowhere; substance without direction goes anywhere at all.
In a reading
Kūn as an answer usually means the useful move is not the assertive one. Support something, accept a role, prepare ground, agree to carry a thing you did not design.
Its recurring test is whether you can do that without resentment and without quietly competing. The hexagram promises good fortune to devotion and reserves its only misfortune for the moment yielding decides it should have been in charge. If the question was whether to push for the lead, this is a no.
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.
-
Six at the top
Dragons fight in the meadow. Their blood is black and yellow.
Yin has run to the very end and turned into its opposite. The receptive contending for the top is the one situation this hexagram cannot survive.
-
Six in the fifth place
A yellow underskirt. Supreme good fortune.
Yellow is the colour of the centre and the garment is the one worn underneath. Distinction that does not need to be on top.
-
Six in the fourth place
A tied sack. No blame, no praise.
Complete discretion. Nothing is risked and nothing is gained, which is occasionally the correct move.
-
Six in the third place
Brilliance held in reserve, and one can hold to it. If you serve a king, take no credit, but see the work through.
Doing the work and declining the byline. The line reads this as strength rather than self-effacement.
-
Six in the second place
Straight, square, great. Without training, nothing fails to further.
The best line in the hexagram. Rightness so unforced that it needs no technique behind it.
-
Six at the beginning
Frost underfoot. Hard ice is coming.
The classic's clearest statement about small signs. Nothing has happened yet, and everything about what will happen is already legible.
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