In Seven Days Comes His Return

“In Seven Days Comes His Return” is the temporal image in Hexagram 24, Return, where a returning line marks the recovery of a proper course and the beginning of renewed movement. Its seven days are interpreted not as a simple forecast, but through the sequence of hexagrams: the waxing and waning of yin and yang gives the image a calendrical structure and a broader analogy for political and social change.

The phrase in Hexagram 24

The hexagram text presents return as a condition of free progress: its subject encounters no one to hinder his comings and goings, receives friends without committing error, and returns to repeat his proper course. The phrase “In seven days comes his return” appears within this account of recovery, followed by the assurance that movement in any direction will be advantageous. Return is therefore more than a backward glance. It is a resumption of the right course, accompanied by the prospect of action.

The line texts distinguish different forms of that resumption. The first, undivided line represents a return from a slight error before it develops into anything requiring repentance, and promises great good fortune. The second, divided line describes an admirable return and likewise promises good fortune. These examples make the hexagram’s general movement concrete: return can begin early, while deviation is still small, and can be carried out well.

The seven-part cycle

The commentary explains the seven days by referring to six preceding hexagrams—44, 33, 12, 20, 23, and 2—associated in its account with the fifth through tenth months. Across these figures, yin lines gradually prevail over yang until Hexagram 2, Khwăn, has entirely displaced the yang lines. Hexagram 24 follows as the seventh figure, and yang begins to assert itself again, eventually displacing the yin lines in turn. The day in the phrase thus stands for a month in the cycle: “seven days” expresses the point at which the sequence turns toward return.

This reading makes the phrase a compact description of reversal within an ordered pattern. The commentary does not specify an equivalent timetable for political life; it says only that something analogous must occur in society and the state. The hexagram’s cyclical image therefore offers a way to think about social change without promising a fixed date or a permanently perfected political order.

Lines, interpretation, and translation

The book’s interpretive method helps explain why the phrase requires more than a literal gloss. Its text consists of short, symbolic discussions attached to figures and their lines: King Wen interprets each whole hexagram, while the Duke of Zhou treats the lines individually. The whole-hexagram interpretation is meant to accord with the combined significance of those six lines, and the meaning of a line varies with the subject named by its hexagram.

The translator argues that a word-for-word rendering cannot reliably convey this material. Chinese written characters, in his account, are symbols of ideas rather than representations of spoken words; translation must therefore seek the author’s thought and express it intelligibly, sometimes supplying a word or two that the original leaves implicit. The explanation of “In Seven Days Comes His Return” exemplifies this interpretive movement: the phrase’s temporal image becomes intelligible through the surrounding hexagram sequence and the commentary’s account of recurring change, rather than through the words alone.

A changing world, not a final perfection

The commentary extends the movement of return from the hexagram’s lines to nature, society, and the state. It explicitly rejects the hope that the I Ching promises a perfect society or kingdom beyond change. The returning yang line instead figures a process in which conditions shift: what has been driven out begins to reassert itself, just as the political and social state of a nation may undergo change.

The phrase’s force lies in holding recurrence and uncertainty together. Its sequence gives return a recognizable place in the pattern of change, but the commentary declines to turn that pattern into an exact social prediction. Return promises renewed movement and a chance to resume the proper course; it does not abolish change or guarantee that any society will reach an unalterable perfection.