Penetration (Sun)

Penetration (Sun) is the image of influence working its way into what needs correction: wind enters every corner, while government’s orders are meant to remedy what is wrong among the people. The hexagram’s limited attainment is not a programme of wholesale renewal; it is a modest improvement that requires capable and virtuous authority, and is best sustained through right conduct and firm correctness.

Image and Political Meaning

Sun is associated with both wind and wood, and its attributes are flexibility and penetration. Here the image is specifically wind: an influence that does not act only at the surface but finds entry into corners and crevices. That movement gives the hexagram its political application. Orders issued by government are intended to reach the people and correct what has gone wrong among them.

Confucius’s comparison of superiors and inferiors to wind and grass supplies a related image: grass bends when wind blows upon it. The commentary also reports a reading in which the upper trigram represents the ruler’s orders and the lower the people’s obedience, but judges that interpretation insufficiently supported by the Text. The political analogy is therefore useful without making every detail of the trigram arrangement a settled explanation.

The Limits of Its Attainment

The figure promises only a little attainment, and its commentary treats that limitation as a problem requiring explanation. One account reads the first line as a measure of what the subject can accomplish: it is weak and lies beneath two strong lines, so its capacity is small. The Khang-hsî editors offer a different account. Since the whole figure signifies penetration, they argue, the weak first line—standing for what is bad—cannot resist the other lines as their influence enters and disperses it.

That interpretation is illustrated through nature, education, and politics, but the small result has a specific meaning: the process corrects and improves rather than revolutionising or renewing. Even this restrained work requires the strong and virtuous, described as the great man. The commentary acknowledges that the competing explanations do not entirely resolve the difficulty, preserving a tension between the figure’s image of far-reaching entry and its modest stated attainment.

Lines, Authority, and Correct Conduct

The line readings qualify the general image by showing how position and strength affect action. The first line is weak where strength is called for; its subject’s movements express perplexity and a lack of vigour and decision. At the third line, strength is in its proper place, but the position at the top of the lower trigram makes its subject restless and vehement. Its correlate at the sixth is unsuitable, so the striving proves ineffective and brings regret.

The fourth line is weak in a place appropriate to weakness, and its counterpart in the first line is also weak. Yet the fourth rests beneath the strong, central fifth line, which counteracts the adverse omen and yields a good auspice. The commentary illustrates success through a hunt whose catch could be divided among three purposes: sacrifice, hospitality to visitors, and the kitchen. Adequacy for all three was counted a successful hunt, a practical measure of provision rather than excess.

The fifth line is the seat of honour and the place of the lord of Sun, from whom charges and commands issue. Its position is both central and correct, and its subject should embody Sun’s qualities at their best: docility and accordance with what is right. Here the advantage of firm correctness is expressly insisted upon. The sixth line, by contrast, concludes with evil when Sun’s quality is carried to excess; the commentary adopts a one-character change to the received Text in explaining that warning.

Interpretation and Commentary

The treatment of Penetration also exemplifies the book’s method of reading. Its hexagram-wide theme offers an initial account, but the line interpretations test and qualify that account through their distinct positions, strengths, and correspondences. A strong line in the right place does not guarantee success if its subject is restless or lacks a proper correlate; conversely, a weak line may fare well when its position and relation to the central fifth line counteract an adverse sign. The hexagram’s meaning emerges through these structural distinctions, not through the image of wind alone.

This method depends on interpretation rather than literal word-for-word translation. The translator argues that Chinese written characters are symbols of ideas and that their combination conveys what the writer thinks, not simply a sequence of words the translator can reproduce. A translator must therefore use the figures to enter the author’s thought and render that meaning as exactly and concisely as possible, sometimes supplying a word or two that the original leaves implicit. Parentheses mark such additions in the translation, though the translator considers them present in the writer’s thought.

The distinction matters because the hexagram’s explanations are not uniformly easy or conclusive. The commentary records competing accounts of the first line’s limited capacity, finds criticism of those accounts imperfect, and distinguishes the Text from later interpretive layers. It also rejects reading a fully developed doctrine of primary ethereal matter back into the Great Treatise: in its view, that doctrine took shape much later, while the Treatise concerns the ever-changing phenomena of nature and experience. Penetration is thus presented both as a practical image of gradual correction and as a case study in the care required to interpret symbolic language without turning an uncertain reading into settled doctrine.