Thâi (Peace)

Thâi (Peace), the eleventh hexagram, represents a flourishing but temporary political and natural order. Its strong lines below and weak lines above signify progress and success; yet the same account insists that prosperity contains the prospect of its reversal, so good fortune must be maintained through firmness and correctness rather than treated as secure.

Structure and Meaning

The judgment says that “the little gone and the great come,” promising good fortune, progress, and success. The commentary explains this through the hexagram’s arrangement: the three strong lines of Khien are below, while the three weak lines of Khwăn are above. The strong are active and vigorous; the weak are inactive and submissive. Their positions make the movement of the “great” upward and the “little” downward a figure for a course in which the advancing forces prevail.

The commentary rejects the idea that one hexagram must have been transformed into another to produce this arrangement. It argues instead that the sixty-four figures were formed by manipulating whole and divided lines and combining them, and that the words “gone” and “come” here simply mean below and above. The image’s force, on this reading, lies in the configuration itself, not in a hidden sequence of transformations.

The Season of Growth

Thâi is assigned to the first month of the year, the opening month of natural spring. For the ensuing six months, the fostering sun and genial skies sustain processes of growth. The hexagram’s political promise thus has a seasonal counterpart: its favorable condition is not an abstract guarantee, but a period of energetic development supported by the right arrangement of forces.

The first line gives that movement a compact image: grass is pulled up, bringing with it other stalks whose roots are connected to its own. Advance is fortunate because the movement is shared; one advancing element draws others with it. In the second line, strength is moderated by occupying an even place, and the line has a proper correlate in the fifth. Its subject can bear with the uncultivated, cross the Ho without a boat, remember those far away, and avoid selfish friendships. These qualities are presented as conduct in accordance with the due Mean, joining practical capacity to restraint and regard beyond private advantage.

Maintaining Good Fortune

The third line marks the limit of the initial expansion. It is the last of Khien’s three lines, whose strength and activity have produced Thâi’s happy condition. But change is constant in nature and human affairs: night follows day, winter follows summer, and calamity may follow prosperity just as decay follows a flourishing state. The commentary therefore turns the hexagram’s promise into a warning. Firmness and correctness can prolong the present good estate, but cannot abolish change.

The upper lines are also read as participants in maintaining the favorable order, not simply as returning opponents to the strong lines below. In the commentary’s account, they are their correlates, of one heart and mind with them, offering what help they can, humbly but readily. The image of successful order depends, then, not only on strength advancing but on cooperation across the hexagram’s different positions.

The Reversal into Phî

The ending makes the warning concrete. Thâi’s course has run its course, and one of a different, unhappy character is to follow. Earth dug from a moat, once built into a protective wall, has fallen back into the ditch. The work of defense has become an image of collapse: what had been raised to secure the state no longer stands. War would only worsen the danger, and even good proclamations addressed by the ruler to himself and the people of his capital cannot altogether avert the coming evil. The next hexagram is Phî, setting obstruction against Thâi’s earlier passage and making reversal the close of its account of peace.

Divination and Interpretation

The hexagram belongs to a work whose figures could be used in divination, but the book distinguishes that practice from the ethical and political meanings read from them. The historical account describes the use of divining stalks alongside tortoise-shell divination, and says that consultation concerned whether contemplated plans or conditions would turn out fortunately or badly—not the absolute foreknowledge of future events. In the stalk procedure, forty-nine stalks were manipulated three times for each line, requiring eighteen manipulations to form a hexagram; the resulting figure was interpreted through King Wen’s judgments and the Duke of Zhou’s line statements.

The book also explains how to read such figures without treating their symbols as self-interpreting. Whole and divided lines, their positions, their relations to corresponding lines, and the subject named by the hexagram all affect interpretation. The translator’s stated method is likewise interpretive rather than mechanically literal: Chinese characters convey ideas, and a rendering must express the author’s thought in intelligible English while remaining as exact as possible. Thâi’s reading consequently joins its line pattern to spring growth, political cooperation, proper conduct, and the warning that flourishing cannot escape decline.