EN (English)
☶
One of the eight trigrams
Mountain
艮 · Gèn
A solid line laid across two open ones, movement that has come to rest at the top. Gèn is the mountain: a limit, a pause, and the boundary that turns space into a place.
stillness
limits
boundary
completion
- Lines, bottom to top
- Broken · broken · solid
- Image
- Mountain
- Attribute
- Still, stopping
- Family role
- The youngest son
- Element
- Earth
- Direction
- Northeast (Later Heaven)
- Season
- Late winter into early spring
- Animal
- Dog
- Body
- The hand
What it means
Gèn is Zhèn upside down, and the pair carry one idea between them: thunder starts motion, mountain ends it. The strong line has travelled from the bottom of the trigram to the top and has nowhere further to go.
The classic treats stopping as a skill, not a failure. Hexagram 52's Image says the noble person's thoughts do not go beyond his situation, which is a description of concentration rather than of narrowness. Gèn is the trigram of knowing where a thing ends: the end of a task, the edge of your authority, the point past which more effort makes the result worse.
It also marks transitions. Its Later Heaven seat is the northeast, the corner between the old year and the new, and the classic calls it the place where things reach their end and begin again. The mountain is where one season is stored while the next is prepared. As the youngest son it holds the last of Qián's strength, arrived at the summit and holding position.
In a reading
Gèn counsels the deliberate halt. Not abandonment: a stop with a shape to it, made on purpose and held.
Its shadow is obstruction, whether from outside or from a stubbornness that has stopped noticing conditions have changed. When Gèn sits above, something is blocking the way forward. Below, the ground under the matter is fixed and will not be argued with.
Where it appears
As the upper trigram: 4. Youthful Folly, 18. Work on the Decayed, 22. Grace, 23. Splitting Apart, 26. The Taming Power of the Great, 27. Nourishment, 41. Decrease, 52. Keeping Still.
As the lower trigram: 15. Modesty, 31. Influence, 33. Retreat, 39. Obstruction, 52. Keeping Still, 53. Development, 56. The Wanderer, 62. Preponderance of the Small.
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