Following on from this article about the sequence of trigrams through 10 and 11, here’s another place where looking at the trigrams casts light on the story behind the sequence: from Hexagram 12 to 13. Hexagram 12 is Obstruction and negation: communication is completely blocked; everything has ground to a… Read more »Trigrams in the sequence III
‘Obstructing it, non-people.
No harvest in noble one’s constancy.
Great goes, small comes.’
The ‘usual’ interpretation of the Judgement of Hexagram 12 is that there are bad people at work, dominating the environment, sabotaging the noble one’s good efforts. And sometimes, indeed, it can mean exactly that – in particular, that someone is promoting malicious rumours. But in my experience of hexagram 12, this isn’t always – or even usually – the case.
Some translations offer an alternative perspective. James Legge writes of ‘the want of good understanding between men’; Thomas Cleary, in his Taoist I Ching, has ‘denial of humanity’. The Obstruction isn’t necessarily caused by the presence of bad people, but by people denying one anothers’ humanity.
