Penetrating Influence

Penetrating Influence, also called Sun or Hexagram 57, presents influence as a force that enters gradually and reaches into hidden places. The figure promises some attainment and progress, favors movement onward, and recommends seeing the great man; its governing image of wind makes correction a process of persistent penetration rather than abrupt upheaval.

Meaning and Image

The trigram Sun, associated here with wind and wood, carries the attributes of flexibility and penetration. Wind finds its way into every corner and cranny, giving the hexagram a physical image for influence that works by entering, spreading, and correcting rather than by a single dramatic act.

The text describes the outcome as only “some little attainment and progress.” The commentary records competing explanations for that qualification. One explanation takes the first line of the trigram as a measure of what it can accomplish: that weak line is overlaid by two strong lines, limiting its power. The Khang-hsî editors instead argue that the weak first line cannot resist the other lines, whose force enters and dispels its influence. They compare the process to nature, education, and politics: the result is small because it corrects and improves rather than revolutionizing or renewing the whole order.

Influence as Government

The hexagram’s influence is interpreted politically as the orders of government designed to remedy what is wrong among the people. Confucius’s comparison of superiors and inferiors to wind and grass gives the image a relation of unequal influence: when the wind blows, the grass bends. The commentary uses this analogy to clarify how government’s influence acts upon the people, while cautioning that a further account assigning the upper trigram to the ruler’s orders and the lower to popular obedience is not adequately borne out by the text itself.

The political reading makes the hexagram’s modest scale significant. Improvement depends on the strong and virtuous, represented by the recommendation to see the great man, but the process is not described as a wholesale remaking of society. Its force lies in correction that penetrates and improves what is already there.

Divination and Interpretation

The hexagram belongs to a work in which each of the sixty-four figures supports a short, symbolically expressed essay on moral, social, or political themes. The essays give the whole figure’s significance and may indicate what action is appropriate, including whether action is auspicious or inauspicious; the accompanying line interpretations develop the figure’s meaning line by line. The authors wrote in the manner of diviners, but the commentary distinguishes their work from divination itself: their words became oracles for later users, who consulted the figures to judge how circumstances might develop and whether to continue or withdraw from an intended course.

The commentary situates the hexagrams within an established practice of divination using figures and stalks. It describes the traditional account of King Wen studying the figures while imprisoned at Youli, under the danger of possible execution, and presents his interpretations as an effort to confine the follies of divination within reason. In this account, symbolic statements could convey warnings and exhortations about human society and political conditions, not merely obscure predictions. The interpretation of Penetrating Influence follows that method: it turns the figure’s physical quality of wind into an account of how corrective authority may work, while retaining the text’s limited promise of progress rather than claiming a complete transformation.