MEDITATIONS: I CHING; THE BOOK OF CHANGES, CANTO TWENTY-SEVEN

Nourish—Support—Nurture
|or| Nourishment

Look for the opportunity to cooperate with your family, friends, and coworkers. Be of help to your superiors and reaffirm your connection to the Tao. Now is the time for solemn devotional activity. (Bright-Fey 83)

Nourishment is auspicious if correct. Observe nourishment and how you seek your own fulfillment.

Yang 1: Abandoning your spiritual tortoise to watch me, moving your jaw, bodes ill.

Yin 2: Reverse nourishment contravenes the norm. As for nourishment on a hill, an expedition bodes ill.

Yin 3: Contravening correctness in nourishment bodes ill. Do not act on this for ten years, for it profits nothing.

Yin 4: Reverse nourishment is auspicious. A tiger watches intently; it must chase and chase. There is no blame.

Yin 5: When contravening the norm, it bodes well to remain steadfast and upright. It will not do to cross great rivers.

Yang 6: When being the source of nourishment, it bodes well to be diligent and aware of danger. It is beneficial to cross great rivers. (Cleary 153-161)

The purpose of a great accumulation of spiritual and material wealth is to nourish the spirit and the body. That is why the hexagram for Nourishment naturally follows after that of Great Accumulation. The mountain still stands for stability and continuity of culture, yet now, it is thunder residing within in place of heaven. Thunder is initiative and activity, the will to begin and take action. Together, the inward impulse to act gets channeled through the rigid bounds of culture. The result is mutual benefit, a reciprocal relating among all layers of self and society.

That is why the I Ching says the “Nourishment is auspicious if correct.” Those final two words are quite significant here, and special attention on them transforms what at first may seem a self-explanatory sentiment into a warning. “If correct” implies that there is an incorrect way to give or receive nourishment, which further suggests that nourishment is not a good in itself. There is a right and wrong ordering of things in or out of accordance with the Tao—hence the Taoist translation’s imperative to “reaffirm your connection to the Tao.” This entails observation. To check if one is correct, he must be willing to look honestly at himself and others and to see what seems true in and outside of himself.

This brings us to the first Yang. It warns against abandoning our own earned wisdom and moral compasses in favor of those of a weaker person who happens to occupy a higher position. The first Yang corresponds to the fourth Yin, and so such a temptation is natural. When in lowly positions, such as those at the beginning of their life-journeys, wise people ought to resist envy and not “move their jaws” in mimicry of feeding on nourishment which does not belong to them. Such wise yet lowly individuals out to remain on their slow and steady moral trajectories and seek nourishment from within themselves—as the ancient Chinese believed the tortoise did, hence why it could live so long without food or water.

The second Yin is in a balanced position, but it cannot nourish anyone else. It is weak and needs to be nourished yet does it have a proper correspondent. It contravenes nature for the higher to take from the lower, and so the second Yin ought not take her nourishment from the first Yang. Likewise, the sixth Yang has his own proper correspondent, and it is not the second Yin. It would be to invite disaster to seek nourishment from someone of greater accumulation to whom the second Yin has no relationship with. Really, this symbolizes the need for nourishment to be found within, as spoken about in Bright Fey’s Taoist translation. However, in Cleary’s, what is highlighted is that there will be people who should and could find balance in themselves but who will not and will thereby suffer.

The third Yin takes the aforementioned concept to the extreme. Instead of merely seeking the wrong place for nourishment, the third Yin is willing to do anything to get it. That means lying, cheating, stealing, and other forms of immorality. This is precisely what is warned against in the opening lines of this hexagram. That is the warning imparted by those two words, “if correct”. Thus one should not act on this impulse for ten years, after which the cycle will have started again, meaning that one should never demean oneself in order to obtain the nourishment provided by wise men and sages. Paraphrasing from Carl Jung: be wary of wisdom you did not earn.

The fourth Yin has her proper correspondence with the first Yang. This represents those with low levels of power and influence in the institutions heeding the wisdom of the wise people who do not occupy said positions. There is no blame in this case despite the direction of nourishment being reversed. This is because the fourth Yin is in a position to elevate the first Yang, thus making the nourishment mutual—as opposed to parasitic. Even still the I Ching warns that honest observation and constant pursuit of propriety is necessary to keep this relationship virtuous.

Vigilance and perseverance are even more greatly emphasized in the sixth Yin. She has no proper correspondent and is too weak to nourish others. Yet she is in a position of leadership, requiring her to serve and benefit others. This type of person must look above to the sixth Yang for guidance. The sixth Yang is a mentor figure who carries in him the great accumulated wisdom of his time and place. He is a sage of his culture and society, and so long as both he and the weak leadership are cautious—humble and dutiful—it becomes possible for the weak fifth Yin so nourish those below with the wisdom imparted by those wisest above.

This is all to say that, after the pause of progress in which great accumulation can occur, the distribution of said wealth is to conform to what is proper, and what is proper depends on each person’s ability to engage in reciprocal nourishment. Those who can nourish themselves with wisdom within ought to do so. Those who cannot, ought to learn how, for no amount given to them can save them from themselves. Those who stoop to immoral means likewise cannot be helped. But humble leaders and peoples in positions of influence and power yet who are themselves too weak to help can actually help by allowing those both lower and stronger as well as those higher and stronger to bear the burden of preserving the society, institutions, and culture.

I Ching; The Book of Changes, with commentaries by Cheng Yi, translated by Thomas Cleary, Shambala Library, 2003.

I Ching: The Book of Changes; An authentic Taoist translation, translated by John Bright-Fey, Sweetwater Press, 2006.