Dui · Lake

Meaning

Dui ☱ is the lake: a broken, yin line at the top over two whole ones, an opening above a firm depth, like still water whose surface smiles back at the sky. The Discussion of the Trigrams gives it one word, joy, and sets it in the west in mid-autumn, the harvest season in which, it says, all things rejoice. In the family of the trigrams it is the youngest daughter, the yin line in the top place.

The tradition reads in it joy and conversation, openness and the pleasure of sharing: the mouth that speaks and the face that welcomes, the warmth of good company and the ease of persuasion by charm rather than force. Its difficulty is the same pleasure without its depth, talk that goes further than it should, words with an edge, a smile kept up for others while the water underneath goes unattended. A lake is joyful because it is fed; the Book of Changes pairs two lakes to say that friends who talk together keep each other fresh.

Its opposite is Gen ☶, the mountain, a whole line above two broken ones, the youngest son. The lake and the mountain together make Xian, attraction, the 31st hexagram, which the Flying Stars name in the pairing of the 7 and the 8, the young couple.

In practice

• The Kua number: Dui is Kua 7, of the West group. Its four supportive directions are the north-west (Growth), the south-west (Restoration), the north-east (Harmony) and the west, its own place (Stability).
• A Dui house: a home sitting in the west and facing east is a Dui house of the West group.
• The Flying Stars: the west is the Dui palace, home of the 7 Red, Po Jun, the star of speech, charm and pleasure, timely through Period 7, from 1984 to 2003, and out of its time in Period 9.
• The 24 mountains: Dui’s 45° hold Geng, You and Xin, from 247.5° to 292.5°; You, due west, is the Rooster’s branch.
• The year: a Pig, Rabbit or Goat year sends the Three Killings to the west, as in 2027; the classics suggest facing them rather than sitting with them at one’s back.

Across traditions

• In the Book of Changes Dui doubled is the 58th hexagram, lake upon lake, which Richard Wilhelm named the Joyous: two lakes that feed each other, as friends who learn together. Human Design’s Gate 58 is that hexagram.
• In Western astrology the middle of Dui’s season is the autumn equinox, when the Sun enters Libra, the sign of balance and of the other; the Chinese west is autumn and metal, Libra air: the same moment, read in two languages.

Origin and history

The Discussion of the Trigrams, one of the Ten Wings of the Book of Changes, written between the Warring States and the Han, gives Dui the mouth among the parts of the body and the sheep among the animals, and images that join the lake and the mouth: the tongue, the spoken word, and the hard, salty ground where a lake has dried. In the Early Heaven arrangement, which Shao Yong and the Song scholars traced to Fu Xi, Dui stands in the south-east; in the Later Heaven arrangement, traced to King Wen, which Feng Shui follows, it holds the west.

Richard Wilhelm’s translation of 1924 named it “the Joyous”. The compass schools set it in the west of the luopan, and the Ba Zhai Ming Jing makes it the trigram of the seventh Kua; the Flying Stars, after Shen Zhureng, read its palace as the home of the 7.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune draws Dui from its lines, whole, whole and broken from the bottom up, rather than from a font. The trigram holds the west in the Later Heaven order and carries the Lo Shu’s number 7, which makes it Kua 7: the yang count gives it for a solar year such as 1984, 1993 or 2002, the yin count for 1983, 1992 or 2001, each year turning at Lichun.

Its directions follow from the lines. The north-west’s Qian differs from Dui in its top line alone, Growth; the south-west’s Kun in its two lower lines, Restoration; the north-east’s Gen in all three, Harmony. The four trigrams of the East group give Dui’s four challenging directions.

Correspondences