Great Preponderance (Tâ Kwo)

Great Preponderance (Tâ Kwo), Hexagram XXVIII, frames an exceptional crisis as a test of whether a great burden can be borne. Its central image is a weak beam under excessive weight, but the judgment does not counsel paralysis: action in any direction may succeed under the hexagram’s conditions. The commentary distinguishes extraordinary ability from mere excess, and even an unsuccessful act may be judged differently when its aim is to benefit all under heaven.

The Hexagram’s Problem and Promise

The judgment says that Great Preponderance suggests a weak beam and that there will be advantage in moving in any direction whatever, with success. The commentary reads this as a situation in which unusually difficult circumstances call for unusually great gifts in the conduct of affairs. The emergency itself does not make every response right: what is extraordinary must still be proper.

The figure explains the danger through its arrangement. Two weak lines stand at the top and bottom, while four strong lines lie between them, creating the image of a great beam unable to support its own weight. Yet the second and fifth lines are strong and central; together with the attributes of the component trigrams, these features provide the auspicious counterweight to the image of strain. The hexagram therefore holds danger and opportunity together: the structure is overloaded, but the central positions can still make effective action possible.

Line Images and Unequal Responses

The first line is divided and placed at the bottom of the figure and of the trigram Sun, associated in the commentary with flexibility and humility. Its subject carefully places mats of white mao grass under things set on the ground. The small, deliberate precaution embodies a suitable response at the weakest point of the structure; the judgment says there is no error.

The second line, undivided and central, offers two images: a decayed willow producing shoots, or an old husband possessing a young wife. In either image, what appears spent or mismatched gives way to renewed possibility, and the line promises advantage in every way. The fifth line complicates this pattern. Though also strong and central, it lacks a proper correlate below; its willow produces flowers rather than shoots, and its decay will soon return. The commentary adds that an old wife will have no children. Strength and centrality alone cannot secure lasting renewal, and the line’s conduct merits no praise even if it is not condemned as harshly as the third line’s.

At the top, a divided line shows someone boldly wading through a stream until the water hides the crown of his head. The act ends badly, though the text says there is no ground for blame. The commentary explains that the subject presses on to meet the exceptional demands of the time and benefit all under heaven, but is not equal to the task and sinks beneath it. His motive changes the judgment on his conduct without changing the outcome: the undertaking fails, but the intention matters.

Reading the Figure and Its Lines

In the book’s account of how the Text works, a hexagram’s overall interpretation and its line readings are related but not interchangeable. King Wen takes up the figures in sequence and gives each hexagram’s general significance, sometimes indicating what action its circumstances call for and whether that action is fortunate. The Duke of Zhou interprets the individual lines, beginning at the bottom, through symbolic illustrations and corresponding judgments of fortune. The overall reading is meant to accord with the combined significance of the six lines.

Line position shapes how those illustrations are understood. The second and fifth lines are valued as the middle lines of their respective trigrams; the fifth may represent a sovereign or commander, while the second may represent an able minister or skilled officer. Their relationship can make their mutual action beneficial, but the hexagram’s name and subject determine how the line meanings apply. In Great Preponderance, the central strength of the second and fifth helps explain the auspice, while the fifth line’s missing correlate limits what that strength can achieve.

Translation and Interpretive Limits

The commentary’s reading belongs to a broader problem of translating the Yî. Its translator describes an early attempt, made in 1854, to match the concise Chinese with equally concise English; the resulting version consisted of word groups with little syntactic connection and proved nearly unintelligible. He later concluded that a literal rendering could not convey the text’s thought. In his account, Chinese characters are symbols of ideas rather than representations of spoken words, so a translator must first enter into the author’s thought and then express it intelligibly in another language.

That freedom is not, in his formulation, permission to depart from the original at will. The aim remains to convey its meaning as exactly and concisely as possible, though a few words may need to be supplied to make explicit what the writer’s thought leaves implicit. Parentheses mark many such additions in the translation. This distinction matters for Great Preponderance: the beam, the stream, and the line positions supply a structured symbolic argument, while the commentary’s account of extraordinary ability and motive is an interpretation of how that argument applies to conduct.

The translator also argues against reading the Yî as an abstract creation theory. He takes its theme to be the changing phenomena of nature and experience, and warns that later philosophical doctrines should not be projected backward onto it. Great Preponderance accordingly turns on a practical tension that its images make legible: extraordinary circumstances demand action, but the burden must still be matched by the capacity and judgment of the person who undertakes it.