Biting Through (Shih Ho)

Biting Through (Shih Ho), also called Union by Gnawing, is Hexagram XXI of the I Ching. It portrays law as the force that breaks through an obstruction between people and allows them to come together again. The image makes punishment neither an end in itself nor an unqualified good: its purpose is to restore social understanding, and its auspice turns evil when an offender persists after the action of judgment has passed.

Meaning and Political Image

The hexagram’s judgment promises successful progress in the situation it describes and says that legal constraints will be advantageous. Its traditional image explains this claim through the form of the figure: strong lines at the beginning and end suggest the jaws, while the intervening lines leave the mouth open around something that must be bitten through. Once that obstruction is removed, the jaws can close. In political terms, the obstruction is whatever prevents people of different ranks from reaching mutual understanding; law supplies the force needed to remove it.

The image therefore links social union to the exercise of authority. The commentary does not treat reconciliation as something that follows from goodwill alone: the obstacle must be confronted, and legal constraint is presented as capable of doing so successfully. Yet the aim remains reunion, not punishment for its own sake. The figure’s favorable judgment depends on the work of clearing the obstruction and restoring a functioning relationship between high and low.

The Lines and the Limits of Punishment

The line texts distinguish those who administer judgment from those who receive punishment. The first and sixth lines stand outside the central action of the figure and represent punished parties; the intervening lines represent those carrying out the process. The opening line associates a minor offense, checked early, with restraint and no error. The commentary notes that the punishment described can sound severe to a Western reader, while allowing that the wording might mean restraint rather than permanent deprivation. This uncertainty qualifies the image without removing its emphasis on addressing wrongdoing before it advances.

The second line presents judgment as a process that may have to intensify. Its subject is appropriately placed and centrally situated, so the action begins effectively against a comparatively easy case; a stronger offender immediately below, however, does not yield as readily. The commentary’s principle is that punishment must continue and increase until its proper end is secured. The sequence makes effectiveness a condition of the hexagram’s promised success, while the lines’ differing cases prevent the judgment from being reduced to one uniform penalty.

At the other end of the sequence, the sixth line depicts a strong criminal who remains deaf to counsel after the figure’s action has already run its course. The commentary marks the result as evil: persistence in wrongdoing at this late stage is no longer part of a successful restoration of order. Set against the favorable judgment of the hexagram as a whole, this ending supplies a limit. Legal force may remove the obstruction, but it cannot make continued defiance auspicious simply by extending the process indefinitely.

Reading the Text and Its Historical Frame

The book’s account of the I Ching treats its hexagrams as figures accompanied by short, symbolically expressed essays on moral, social, and political subjects. King Wen interprets each whole hexagram and indicates the likely fortune of action in its circumstances; the Duke of Zhou then interprets its six lines in sequence, with the line meanings intended to accord with the meaning of the whole figure. Biting Through’s movement from obstruction to union, and from an effective judgment to the warning at its final line, exemplifies that relation between the larger situation and its particular cases.

The account also cautions against mistaking the divinatory form for a simple forecast. The authors wrote in the manner of diviners, and later readers used the hexagrams as oracles; but the commentary presents the text’s language as carrying moral and political instruction. Its interpretation of Biting Through accordingly treats legal constraint as a lesson about repairing relations within a community, not merely as a prediction of whether a particular action will prosper.

The translator’s method reinforces the need to distinguish a symbol’s wording from the idea it conveys. He argues that a literal rendering of the classical Chinese can become unintelligible, because written characters function as symbols of ideas rather than direct representations of spoken words. A translator should express the author’s meaning as exactly as possible, supplying words when needed to make implicit thought clear. That approach helps explain why the jaw-and-obstruction image becomes an account of law’s social purpose, while the line-by-line details retain the text’s uncertainty about how punishment is applied.

The chapter’s wider historical setting is one of political disorder. Its account describes the Shang realm as demoralized, with law violated by nobles and officers and violence spreading among ordinary people; it also presents King Wen studying the lineal figures while imprisoned at Youli under the threat of death. The commentary does not establish that Hexagram XXI records a particular judgment from that period. Rather, this background makes the hexagram’s concern with law and restored social order legible as part of the book’s broader moral and political world, without turning its symbolic counsel into a documented historical episode.