Hexagram 27 · Yi · Nourishment

Sustenance

What you take in shapes you.

The situation

Attention, information, company, food — you're being formed by your inputs right now, whether you chose them or not.

What it asks of you

Watch what you consume and what you say. Both are nourishment or poison.

Read this against your own situation →

Where it leads

The opposite reading
Overload
The structure is bending.
What sits underneath it
Receptivity
Strength through yielding.

The six lines

  1. initial You put down your own magic tortoise to watch my jaws working. 舍爾靈龜,觀我朵頤,凶
  2. second Feeding upside down, turning away from the usual road toward the hill. Setting out on that turns. 顛頤,拂經于丘頤,征凶
  3. third Going against what feeds you. Ten years unusable; nothing comes of it. 拂頤,貞凶。十年勿用,无攸利
  4. fourth Feeding upside down, and it goes well. Watching like a tiger, wanting and wanting. Nothing goes wrong. 顛頤吉,虎視眈眈,其欲逐逐,无咎
  5. fifth Turning away from the usual road. Stay where you are. Do not cross the great river. 拂經,居貞吉,不可涉大川
  6. top Everyone is fed from here. Dangerous, and it goes well. Now cross the great river. 由頤,厲吉,利涉大川

The line texts are the oldest layer of the book. They are pictures, not instructions, and they are meant to be held against your own situation rather than decoded.

How this one is built

Written out as six lines, bottom to top, this pattern is 100001 — a solid line is 1, a broken line is 0. Every relationship above is arithmetic on those six digits, not interpretation: reverse the order and you get the other side, flip every digit and you get the opposite reading, take the middle four and you get what sits underneath. Anyone can check the result, which is what separates a structure from a fortune.

The sequence is built the same way. The sixty-four are arranged in thirty-two pairs, and it reads the same upside down, so it is paired with its exact opposite, Overload. This is one of only eight that read the same upside down. The rule holds for all thirty-two pairs without exception — twenty-eight joined by reversal, four by inversion.

In the received order it sits between Reserves and Overload. The order is not alphabetical or random: the old commentary reads it as a chain, one situation giving rise to the next.