The four seasons

The four seasons are more than a calendar framework in this commentary on the I Ching: they make change legible as a recurring order of emergence, growth, ripening, and rest. The commentary connects that natural cycle with divine activity and with the fortunes of human affairs, while warning against treating seasonal imagery as proof of a fully developed theory of cosmic matter. Its seasons illuminate the text, but also expose the interpretive choices through which readers make that illumination intelligible.

The seasonal order and divine activity

The commentary reads an account in the Great Treatise as tracing the work of God through the year by way of the trigrams. In this reading, the sequence is not simply a catalogue of seasonal symbols. It describes an active process: God begins productive work in Kăn, brings processes into balanced action in Sun, makes them manifest in Lî, accomplishes service in Khwăn, rejoices in Tui, struggles in Khien, takes comfort and rests in Khân, and completes the year in Kăn. The cycle thus returns to its point of beginning, but only after passing through differentiated phases of activity and repose.

The author emphasizes that this seasonal reading depends on a particular arrangement of the trigrams associated in the text with King Wen. He challenges the suggestion that King Wen deliberately reordered an established arrangement to symbolize political disorder. The commentary instead proposes that the arrangement may have been adopted for the immediate purpose of displaying the stages of vegetable growth, from spring’s work to winter’s cessation of toil. In that account, the significance of the arrangement lies in how it makes the year’s changing processes visible, not in an unspoken political allegory.

The accompanying explanation of the next paragraph makes the seasonal sequence a way of apprehending divine presence through its effects. God cannot be seen directly, the commentary reports, but may be recognized in the things produced. The year is therefore both a temporal cycle and a field of manifestation: changing natural processes disclose the agency that sustains them. The commentary compares this account with a poem about the seasons, but stresses a difference of manner. The Chinese passage, in its reading, testifies plainly to renewal in spring and to divine work continuing until the year has been crowned with its goodness, without relying on poetic ornament.

Seasons as a pattern of change

The commentary also places the seasons within a larger account of recurring change in nature and human affairs. In its discussion of Thâi, the hexagram associated with the first month of the year and the beginning of natural spring, six months of growth follow under fostering sun and genial skies. The season gives concrete shape to a favorable configuration: the three strong lines below represent active, progressive forces, and their movement is supported by the conditions of the hexagram. Spring here is not merely a pleasant image; it marks a period in which growth can proceed and coordinated action can succeed.

Yet the spring of Thâi does not promise permanence. The commentary reads the third line as signaling that the favorable state has reached its culmination. As night follows day and winter follows summer, calamity may follow prosperity, and the flourishing of a state may be followed by decline. This comparison gives seasonal recurrence a political edge: prosperity is real, but its very place in a cycle means that it cannot be assumed to last. Firmness and correctness may prolong a good condition, but they do not abolish the possibility of change.

The four seasons consequently offer a model of time that resists both simple optimism and despair. Spring’s growth is neither an eternal settlement nor an illusion; it is one phase in a sequence. The commentary brings that pattern to bear on political judgment, where a period of successful government may be maintained for a time even though another condition will follow. Seasonal change teaches readers to distinguish present possibility from permanent guarantee.

Nature, interpretation, and the limits of cosmology

The commentary insists on a distinction between describing changing phenomena and imposing a later cosmological system upon them. It argues that the author of the Great Treatise is concerned with the ever-changing phenomena of nature and experience, not with creation or a doctrine of primary matter in which an ethereal substance expands as yang and contracts as yin. In the commentator’s view, attributing such a developed theory to the text reverses the historical order of ideas: the theory took shape much later, particularly in the Song era, and should not be read back into an earlier account of change.

That caution matters for the seasons. The yearly cycle can express harmony between natural and spiritual processes without requiring every natural event to be explained through a later metaphysical scheme. The commentary sees the text’s seasonal language as evidence of a sense of interaction between Heaven and Earth, but distinguishes that sense from a fully elaborated account of cosmic origins. Its interpretation is therefore both affirmative and restrictive: seasonal change has spiritual meaning, yet the meaning should not be inflated beyond what the text and its historical setting can support.

A guide to reading the figures

Seasonal associations also show why the meaning of a line cannot be interpreted in isolation. The commentary explains that the significance of lines varies according to the hexagram’s name and the condition it represents; the same structural feature may therefore have different applications in different figures. The broader subject governs how the parts are read, just as the seasonal cycle gives individual phases their place in a year. A line’s position and relation to other lines matter, but so does the larger circumstance the hexagram is understood to portray.

This interpretive procedure parallels the commentator’s account of translation. He describes Chinese written characters as symbols of ideas rather than representations of spoken words, and argues that a literal rendering cannot reliably convey the author’s thought. Translation must enter into that thought and express it clearly, sometimes supplying words that the original leaves implicit. The seasonal passages exemplify the stakes of this approach: to translate a sequence of trigrams as a living account of nature is already to decide how its parts cohere, what agency the cycle implies, and how far its implications reach.

The four seasons thus serve simultaneously as a subject of interpretation and as a test of interpretation. They link divine activity to natural processes, make the rise and decline of human conditions intelligible through recurrence, and give readers a means of situating individual figures within a wider pattern. At the same time, the commentary draws a boundary around what that pattern can prove: the cycle conveys change and spiritual significance, but does not license the projection of every later cosmology onto the text.