Kan · Water

Meaning

Kan ☵ is water: a whole, yang line held between two broken, yin ones, a strength running inside softness, like a river in its bed. The Discussion of the Trigrams calls it the pit, the hollow that water fills before it flows on, and gives it the north and the heart of winter, where, it says, all things return to rest after their labour. In the family of the trigrams it is the middle son, the yang line in the middle place.

The tradition reads in it depth and flow: the courage to go on through difficulty, as water keeps its course whatever the ground, and a gift for listening, since water takes the shape of what holds it. Its difficulty is the other face of the same depth, a tendency to sink into a problem rather than move through it, to feel the current more than the bank. Water that stops grows still and cold; water that keeps moving wears down stone.

Its opposite is Li ☲, fire, a broken line held between two whole ones: bright outside and open within, where Kan is soft outside and firm within. Set one over the other, water over fire, they make Ji Ji, “after completion”, the 63rd hexagram, which the Flying Stars name in the pairing of the 1 and the 9.

In practice

• The Kua number: Kan is Kua 1, of the East group. Its four supportive directions are the south-east (Growth), the east (Restoration), the south (Harmony) and the north, its own place (Stability).
• A Kan house: a home that sits in the north and faces south is a Kan house of the East group; the Eight Mansions read it as suited to the four Kua of that group, 1, 3, 4 and 9.
• The Flying Stars: the north is the Kan palace, home of the 1 White, the star of study, careers and journeys; the reading of a home’s north palace offers Kan in the encyclopedia.
• The 24 mountains: Kan’s 45° hold three mountains, Ren, Zi and Gui, from 337.5° to 22.5°; Zi, at the very north, is the Rat’s branch.
• The year: a Tiger, Horse or Dog year sends the Three Killings to the north, as in 2026; the classics suggest facing them rather than sitting with them at one’s back.

Across traditions

• In the Book of Changes Kan doubled is the 29th hexagram, also called Kan, water upon water: it counsels keeping faith and going on, as water does, without stopping at the edge of the drop. Human Design’s Gate 29 is that hexagram.
• In Korea Kan is one of the four trigrams on the national flag, standing for water and the moon.
• In Western astrology water is one of the four elements, feeling and depth, the element of the water signs; the trigram’s water is a figure of lines and a place on the compass, akin to it but never the same.

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 Kan most of what the tradition still says of it: water, the north, the middle son, the ear among the parts of the body, the pig among the animals, and a long list of images, among them the ditch, the bow, the wheel and the moon. In the Early Heaven arrangement, which Shao Yong and the Song scholars traced to Fu Xi, Kan stands in the west, facing Li in the east; in the Later Heaven arrangement, traced to King Wen, which Feng Shui follows, it holds the north.

Richard Wilhelm’s translation of 1924 called it “the Abysmal”, and through his book the trigram’s names reached European readers. The compass schools set it on the luopan’s ring of eight directions, and the Ba Zhai Ming Jing, the Qing-dynasty manual of the Eight Mansions, makes it the trigram of the first Kua; the Flying Stars, after Shen Zhureng, read its palace as the home of the 1.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune draws Kan from its lines, broken, whole and broken from the bottom up, rather than leaving it to a font. The trigram holds the north in the Later Heaven order and carries the Lo Shu’s number 1, which makes it Kua 1: the yang count gives it for a solar year such as 1981, 1990, 1999, 2008 or 2017, the yin count for 1986, 1995, 2004 or 2013, each year turning at Lichun.

Its directions follow from the lines. The south-east’s Xun differs from Kan in its top line alone, which the Eight Mansions read as Growth; the east’s Zhen differs in its two lower lines, Restoration; the south’s Li in all three, Harmony. Kan’s own place is Stability, and the four trigrams of the West group, each differing in another way, give the four challenging directions.

Correspondences