Nourishment

Nourishment, Hexagram 27, makes the act of sustaining life a test of judgment: good provision depends on examining what is being nourished and choosing its proper aliment. Its image is the mouth, formed by the hexagram’s two solid outer lines and four open lines between them; from bodily feeding the commentary extends the idea to sustaining the mind, oneself, and other people. The auspice is favorable when both the object and manner of nourishment accord with what is right.

Meaning and Image

The hexagram’s name, Î, denotes nourishing, while its line pattern suggests a mouth. The undivided line at the bottom and the undivided line at the top represent the lower and upper jaws; the divided lines between them form the mouth’s cavity. This is not merely a picture of eating: the commentary makes nourishment a broad ethical category, encompassing body and mind, self and others.

That breadth also makes discernment essential. What counts as nourishment, and how it should be provided, varies with its object. The governing instruction is therefore not to accept every source of sustenance indiscriminately, but to use thought to determine proper aliment. The hexagram’s favorable judgment rests on this condition: nourishment must be right in both its substance and its method.

Appetite and Dependence

The first line dramatizes appetite as a failure of self-command. Its subject is strong and occupies the proper place, and might be able to nourish himself like the tortoise, traditionally supposed to live on air rather than solid food. Instead, desire draws him toward the weak fourth line, his proper correlate. The image is of looking until the jaw hangs down, or, in the commentary’s comparison, the mouth waters; the result is an unfavorable omen.

The line’s rebuke is imagined as an address from the fourth line to the first. That framing makes the scene more than a warning against hunger: a subject capable of self-sufficiency turns outward under the pull of desire. The contrast between the tortoise’s supposed independence and the slack-jawed gaze gives the line its force, showing how appetite can displace judgment even when a sounder course is available.

Seeking and Giving Nourishment

The second line warns against looking downward for nourishment, an action described as contrary to what is proper; seeking it from above is no remedy, since advancing toward that source also leads to evil. The paired directions make the warning concern the orientation of dependence, not simply the identity of a provider. Seeking support in the wrong relation or by the wrong approach does not become correct merely because nourishment is needed.

At the opposite end of the hexagram, the sixth line shows the one from whom nourishment comes. His position is perilous, yet the omen is favorable, and crossing the great stream is advantageous. The contrast with the second line is pointed: seeking nourishment through an improper route brings danger, while supplying it from a precarious position can be auspicious. The image treats responsibility for others as consequential action, not passive possession of resources.

Divination and Interpretation

The commentary places Nourishment within a broader account of how the hexagrams were used. It describes divination as a way to test whether contemplated schemes and conditions would turn out luckily or unluckily, rather than as an absolute disclosure of future events. For the procedure, forty-nine stalks were manipulated three times for each line, making eighteen manipulations for a hexagram. Odd numbers produced strong, undivided lines and even numbers weak, divided ones; the resulting figure was interpreted through the hexagram judgment attributed to King Wen and the line illustrations attributed to the Duke of Zhou.

This distinction between procedure, claimed efficacy, and interpretation matters to the reading of the hexagram. The stalks and numerical operations produced a figure, but the text’s counsel concerns the meaning assigned to it: examine what is nourished and whether the means are proper. The commentary also notes that the divinatory language can be misleading to a cursory reader, particularly if it is taken to promise foreknowledge of every possible occurrence. Nourishment thus stands both as an oracle within an inherited divinatory practice and as a concise ethical inquiry into appetite, dependence, and the obligations of provision.