Already

It can be interesting to look at how the names of the hexagrams are used in the text of the Yijing – I mean, besides in the eponymous hexagram. This happens quite a bit, and while sometimes it’s obviously just normal usage of a common word (like you 有, ‘having’ or ‘there is’, from the name of Hexagram 14), at other times it does seem intentional.

One of these is the use of ji 既, ‘already’, as in the name of Hexagram 63: ji ji, Already Across. This shows up three times – in 9.6, 19.3 and 29.5.

Ji 既 means ‘since’, ‘already’, ‘later’, ‘complete’ and ‘full’. As you can see –

– the character originally shows someone facing away from a food pot, already finished eating. It’s used to indicate an action that’s just recently taken place.

9.6 zhi 5

‘Already’ makes its first appearance in Hexagram 9, line 6:

‘Already rained, already come to rest.
Honour the power it carries.
The wife’s constancy brings danger,
The moon is almost full.
Noble one sets out to bring order – pitfall.’

(I’ve already (!) written about this line in recent posts about rain, and the almost-full moon, so I’ll be brief.)

This is a striking place to find ‘already’, at the end of a hexagram that’s all about what isn’t happening yet: it isn’t raining, but there are dark clouds, so maybe later…? And then, at last, rain.

It’s already rained and stopped: the seeds will already be germinating, Zhou strength is already growing, and possibly the wife is already pregnant. All this is something to honour and incubate, not to act on directly. A process has begun, and change is in the air. It’s really quite reminiscent of Hexagram 63 itself: a new beginning; now what?

The step of change for this line (the hexagram it changes to when it’s the only line moving) is 5, Waiting. Interestingly, you could say you’ve ‘already waited’ when you receive this line: you waited for the rain, and it came. But now there is a new kind of waiting to be done, honouring and incubating the new growth.

19.3 zhi 11

Then there’s 19.3:

‘Sweetness nearing,
No direction bears fruit.
Already grieving it, no mistake.’

Not unlike Hexagram 9, Hexagram 19 seems an odd place to encounter ‘already’. It’s about what draws near, what’s in the process of growing and not to be hurried along to a conclusion – only this line has the sense of ‘get it over with, finish with it already’. Move on past the nice sweet idea, get out into the real world of the outer trigram, rejoin the Flow of Hexagram 11 and let it carry you past this.

‘Sweet nearing’ is something appealing, pleasant – literally something that tastes nice. I think of it as a promise too good to be true; Wilhelm describes it as a careless, easy-going attitude in response to success; Wang Bi saw it as overseeing with seductive, wicked flattery.

In any event, ‘no direction bears fruit’. This is a generally pretty dire omen that indicates not just that this is bad, but that it’s a dead end – not something you can salvage with a constructive approach. Maybe the most similar usage is at 45.3:

‘Now gathering, now lamenting.
No direction bears fruit.
Going on, no mistake.
Small shame.’

There’s a Gathering that means lamenting, so it’s not wrong to move on; here’s Nearing that amounts to nothing much, so move on already. ‘Do not sorrow about this truth,’ says the fan yao, 11.3. There’s a real world out there, awaiting your participation and engagement. Small – like the ‘sweetness nearing’ – goes, and great comes; that phase is over, and a new one is coming.

29.5 zhi 7

And finally (at least until Hexagram 63 itself), 29.5:

‘The chasm is not overflowing,
Only already level.
No mistake.’

There’s more than one possible translation here: ‘only’, in ‘only already level’, was translated by Kunst as ‘earth spirits’, so that the whole line describes earth spirits already satisfied by the offering poured into the pit for them. Such an offering might be made before the army marches out – and Hexagram 7, the Army, is the step of change for this line, with trigrams showing water in the earth.

This makes surprisingly little difference to the overall sense of the line, though, which is about the wisdom of enough. The pit is already level, or the spirits are already calm – so there’s been enough pouring out, enough commitment, at least for now. (There can be a sense of ‘there’s enough for this mission – sufficient funds to pay today’s bills.) Now what? Perhaps we march out now, or perhaps we rest.

Coda

Looking at the three ‘already’ lines together…

‘Already rained, already come to rest.
Honour the power it carries.
The wife’s constancy brings danger,
The moon is almost full.
Noble one sets out to bring order – pitfall.’
‘Sweetness nearing,
No direction bears fruit.
Already grieving it, no mistake.’
‘The chasm is not overflowing,
Only already level.
No mistake.’

…I think they all share a sense that one phase is over, we’re on the cusp of a new one, and we need to pay attention to what comes next.

The structural features are interesting:

• all three instances are in the Upper Canon
• all three change to a hexagram also in the Upper Canon
• …and actually, all three change to a hexagram that comes before them in the Sequence of Hexagrams.
  So all three line changes are looking back – or maybe both back and forward.

This all gets even more interesting when you look at the opposite of ‘already’: ‘not yet‘…

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