Return (Fû)

Return (Fû), Hexagram XXIV, gives recovery a precise shape: after decay has reached its climax, one strong line returns beneath five weak lines, beginning a gradual change in the balance. The hexagram links this turning point to the winter solstice and to political and social renewal, while warning that return is not automatic: a course properly resumed can prosper, but a ruler who remains astray may bring lasting calamity.

Meaning and Structure

Return is associated with coming back or beginning again. Its overall judgment promises free course and progress: the returning subject encounters no distress in going out or coming in, friends come, and movement in any direction can be advantageous. The text also says that the subject will return to and repeat the proper course, and gives the striking measure, “In seven days comes his return.”

The figure’s pattern makes that promise legible. Where the preceding hexagram has one strong line above five weak lines, Return has one strong line below five weak ones. The returning line is the bottom line of the trigram of movement; above it, the trigram of docility and capacity suggests that it will meet no distressing obstacle. The weak lines are described as changing before it into strong lines and becoming friends, while the bright quality grows brighter from day to day and month to month.

Natural and Political Cycles

The commentary places Return in the eleventh month, at the winter solstice, when the sun turns back in its course and proceeds steadily toward the summer solstice. The seasonal sequence begins with the ninth month, when cold and decay are nearly complete, and continues through the tenth month, represented by Khwăn, before reaching Return. Nature’s turn supplies a model for changes in a nation’s political and social condition: recovery begins when decay has reached its height, but the cycle does not promise a perfect or immovable society.

The phrase “In seven days comes his return” is explained through the sequence of monthly hexagrams. Across the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months, yin lines gradually prevail over yang until they have entirely displaced them in Khwăn. Return is the seventh figure in that sequence, the point at which yang begins to assert itself again and then gradually displaces yin. The commentary proposes taking a day for a month when reading the phrase in relation to the year; it adds that something analogous, though not precisely specified, must occur in society and the state.

Conduct and Consequences

The line texts distinguish degrees of return. The first line describes a subject turning back from a limited error, one that has not grown into an act requiring repentance, and associates that return with great good fortune. The second line’s return is called admirable and is also auspicious. The commentary identifies the first line’s return with the way of the Superior Man and explains that return presupposes some prior deviation from that way.

At the opposite extreme, the topmost line depicts a subject wholly astray on the question of returning. The result is evil, calamities, and errors. If that subject mobilizes armies according to his mistaken views, the campaign ends in a great defeat whose consequences reach the ruler of the state; even ten years will not repair the disaster. The contrast makes the hexagram’s optimism conditional: renewal is possible, but refusal or failure to turn back can carry consequences beyond the individual.

Interpretation and Limits

The commentary reads the returning bottom line as the beginning of renewed brightness, not as proof that change ends in permanent perfection. In nature, the shift from the winter solstice toward summer offers a recurring image for that process; in social and political life, the same pattern supports hope for recovery without promising a flawless final order.

The text’s divinatory wording also leaves room between an oracle and its interpretation. The translator describes the Yî as difficult to render literally: its written characters are treated as symbols of ideas, and translation as an effort to convey the author’s thought rather than mechanically reproduce the words. He says that occasional clarifying words may therefore be supplied, while insisting that the aim remains to express the original meaning as exactly and concisely as possible. Return’s cycle of reversal is thus presented both through the hexagram’s lines and through a reading that relates those lines to seasonal and political change.