Nourishment (Î)

Nourishment (Î), also called The Jaws and identified as Hexagram XXVII, presents care as a matter of discernment rather than mere supply: one must judge what is being nourished and seek the proper sustenance through thought. Its image of the mouth links bodily feeding to the provision of support for oneself and others, while its line readings turn that image into counsel about dependence, responsibility, and the limits of authority.

The Hexagram’s Image and Governing Principle

The hexagram takes its name from Î, the upper jaw, and its six-line pattern suggests an open mouth: undivided lines form the lower and upper edges, with four divided lines between them as the cavity. The first line belongs to the moving lower trigram, figured as the mobile chin; the sixth belongs to its solid upper counterpart, the fixed jaw. The bodily image gives the hexagram a visible structure, but its subject extends beyond the body. Nourishment may concern one’s own body or mind, or the care of other people, and both its object and its method vary with the circumstances.

The governing test is that nourishment, in both what it provides and how it provides it, must accord with what is right. The hexagram’s overall auspice is good, but that favorable judgment is conditional: provision is not automatically beneficial simply because it sustains someone. The opening instruction is to examine what one is seeking to nourish and to use thought to determine the proper aliment. Discernment, rather than appetite or abundance alone, therefore organizes the hexagram’s moral logic.

The Line Readings: Desire and Dependence

The first line depicts a person abandoning an efficacious tortoise and staring at another until the lower jaw hangs down. The image makes desire visible as an undignified dependence: the subject could, in the commentary’s account, nourish himself like a tortoise supposedly living on air, yet is drawn away from self-sufficiency by longing for the weak fourth line, his proper correlate. The result is an evil auspice. The commentary reads the line as an expostulation, apparently addressed by the fourth line to the first, so that the warning is staged as a rebuke between related positions rather than as an abstract maxim.

The second line likewise warns against seeking nourishment in the wrong direction. Its subject looks downward for support, contrary to what is proper, or seeks it from above; advancement on that course leads to evil. The line’s alternatives emphasize that the problem is not simply a lack of provision but a disordered relation between seeker and source. The hexagram asks whether support is being sought in a way appropriate to the person’s position and circumstances.

Responsibility and the Limits of Office

The fourth line turns from the dependent seeker to a figure concerned with nourishing and training those below. Though weak in himself, this subject looks intensely to the strong first line for help. Because the first line is the fourth’s proper correlate, the commentary finds no error in that reliance: the line’s own weakness does not disqualify it from responsibility when it recognizes the support it needs.

The fifth line occupies the ruler’s position but is not equal to its demands. Its good fortune depends on firm reliance on the strong sixth line, and even with that support it is warned against the most difficult undertakings. Authority here is not represented as self-sufficiency. The middle position carries a burden that must be recognized, and prudent limits are part of sound rule.

At the top, the sixth line is the source from whom nourishment comes. Its position is perilous, yet the line receives a favorable judgment and says that crossing the great stream will be advantageous. The commentary explains the high stakes: the fifth relies on this strong figure, who, fully possessed by the hexagram’s idea, understands himself as master or tutor to all under heaven. The task is hard and the responsibility great; his awareness of both is what enables him to prove equal to them. Nourishment thus culminates not in effortless authority, but in an onerous charge undertaken with a clear sense of its danger and scale.

Reading the Text and Its Symbols

The hexagram also illustrates how the book’s symbolic figures are interpreted. Its line meanings are not read in isolation from the whole: the name and theme of a hexagram shape how each position applies, while position and correspondence modify a line’s significance. The first and fourth positions are correlates, as are the second and fifth; here, the first–fourth relation helps explain both the first line’s desire and the fourth line’s search for aid. Such interpretive rules make the mouth image more than a picture: the figure’s structure supplies a framework for judgments about who provides, who receives, and how their relationship bears on the outcome.

The translator’s account of the work’s method clarifies why these readings require interpretation rather than mechanical paraphrase. In his first translation, he tried to match the original’s concision, producing English words with little syntactic connection and a version as difficult to understand as the Latin translation he followed. He later argued that Chinese written characters function as symbols of ideas, not representations of words, and that a literal rendering therefore cannot reliably convey the author’s thought. His aim became to express that thought as exactly and concisely as possible, occasionally supplying a word to make explicit what the original leaves implicit; he marked such additions in parentheses. Nourishment’s movement from the shape of a mouth to questions of self-support, mutual aid, and public responsibility exemplifies the interpretive work such a method entails.