Meaning
It is 晉, the rising sun, turned upside down: the light has gone under the ground. 明 is brightness and 夷 to wound or to bring low, and our title follows Legge's own gloss. The Judgment counsels two things in a dark time: recognise how hard the position is, and keep firm and correct.
The Image draws the method out of the picture: the superior man manages people by keeping his intelligence veiled, clear inside and dim outside. One of the Wings reads the hexagram as history. It says that King Wen, outwardly compliant under the last Shang king while inwardly clear, used it, and so did the Viscount of Ji, who kept his purpose by hiding it; the fifth line names him. Those readings are the Wings', centuries after the text. In our own words, 明夷 is about how clarity survives when it cannot be shown.
The lines
The first line flies with drooping wings and goes without food for three days as it leaves; the second is hurt in the left thigh and escapes on a strong horse. The third hunts in the south and takes the great chief of the darkness, and is told not to set everything right at once; the fourth slips into the left side of the dark and out of its gate. The fifth is the Viscount of Ji keeping his light in a dark court. At the top the darkness itself "had at first ascended to (the top of) the sky", in Legge's words, and then sinks into the earth.
Within 明夷 lies 解, hexagram 40; its pair is 晉, hexagram 35, and every line flipped gives 訟, hexagram 6.
In the birth cast
The time cast arrives at 明夷 when the year, month and day leave 0, counted as 8 on eight, which puts 坤 earth above, and the same total with the hour added leaves 3, which puts 離 fire below. Which line moves depends on what the whole total leaves on six, and each line turns the figure into a different hexagram:
- Line 1 (初九) moving: becomes 15 謙 Qiān, Modesty
- Line 2 (六二) moving: becomes 11 泰 Tài, Flow
- Line 3 (九三) moving: becomes 24 復 Fù, Return
- Line 4 (六四) moving: becomes 55 豐 Fēng, Fullness
- Line 5 (六五) moving: becomes 63 既濟 Jì Jì, Already Across
- Line 6 (上六) moving: becomes 22 賁 Bì, Adornment
Lines 2 to 5 give the hexagram within, 40 解 Xiè, Release. Everyone born in the same lunar day and double hour has the same cast, so the figure describes a moment, not a person.
Correspondences
Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.
- Trigram virtues (Shuogua, chapter 7)
- 離 bright, attached below; 坤 yielding, compliant above, in our English sourced
- Trigram family places (Shuogua)
- middle daughter below, mother above sourced
- Trigram body and animal images (Shuogua)
- eyes and pheasant below; belly and ox above sourced
- Trigram phases (a classical correspondence: the Plum Blossom text's table)
- Fire below, Earth above. The Han assignment of 梅花易數, book 1, also used by Jing Fang; not stated as such in the Zhouyi sourced
- Inverse and opposite
- Upside down: 35 晉 Jìn, Advance; every line flipped: 6 訟 Sòng, Dispute sourced
- Human Design gate
- Gate 36, from 352.625° to 358.25° of the tropical zodiac on Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
- Our English title
- Brightness Wounded: EsoTerrier's own, from the sense of 明夷 our construction
How the schools read it
- The Zhouyi, in Legge's translation (1882)
- “Ming Î indicates that (in the circumstances which it denotes) it will be advantageous to realise the difficulty (of the position), and maintain firm correctness.”
- The Image (大象), one of the Wings, in our paraphrase
- The bright sun entering within the earth; the superior man manages men by keeping his intelligence obscured.
- The Plum Blossom method (Ming)
- A figure reached by numbers: 坤 above when the year, month and day leave 0 on eight, 離 below when the same total with the hour leaves 3.
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987)
- Takes the number for its gate 36 and puts it on the zodiac; its own reading, which we do not quote.
- EsoTerrier
- Fire sunk into the earth: brightness wounded and hidden; keep the light within, steady through the hard time, until it can show again.
Claims about it
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Gate 36 of Human Design, at 352.625° to 358.25° of the zodiac, is where the I Ching itself places hexagram 36.
falseWhat the record shows: The wheel is Shao Yong's circle rotated by Ra Uru Hu in 1987 to 1989 so that hexagram 41 starts at 2° Aquarius. No Chinese source we found puts the hexagrams on degrees of the zodiac.
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Being born under 明夷 Míng Yí fixes a person's character.
unverifiedWhat the record shows: A modern reading with no source in the tradition. The Zhouyi has no birth hexagram; the cast reads a figure, not a person, and everyone born in the same lunar day and double hour shares it.
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King Wen wrote this hexagram's text in prison, about his own captivity.
told as loreWhat the record shows: The Shiji says only that he "is said to have" expanded the trigrams to sixty-four at Youli. The Wings later read 明夷 as his story; scholars date the text to the late 9th century BCE, more than a century after him.
