Kun · Earth

Meaning

Kun ☷ is the earth: three broken lines, yin through and through, open in every place. The Discussion of the Trigrams gives it one word, shùn, yielding or devoted, the quality of the ground that takes the seed and the rain and gives them back as a harvest. It is the mother of the family of trigrams, and its place in the Later Heaven order is the south-west, at the end of summer, when the earth, the Discussion says, nourishes all things.

The tradition reads in Kun receptivity, care and patience: the ground on which others build, the gift of holding things together without needing to be seen, of letting a thing grow at its own pace. Its difficulty is the shadow of the same openness, giving way where it could hold, carrying others’ weight past its own strength, waiting when the time to act has come. The Book of Changes gives it the patience of a mare, which follows and endures, and sets beside it Qian, which leads.

Its opposite is Qian ☰, heaven, three whole lines. The two are the father and the mother of the six other trigrams, each of which is one of them with a line or two changed, and the Book of Changes opens with both, heaven first, then the earth that answers it.

In practice

• The Kua number: Kun is Kua 2, of the West group, whose four supportive directions are the north-east (Growth), the west (Restoration), the north-west (Harmony) and the south-west, its own place (Stability).
• The rule for 5: a Kua of 5 has no trigram of its own, and the yang count takes Kun, as most schools do; the yin count takes Gen.
• A Kun house: a home sitting in the south-west and facing north-east is a Kun house of the West group.
• The Flying Stars: the south-west is the Kun palace, home of the 2 Black, the star of land, property and care, whose sector the classics ask to keep bright and calm when it is out of its time.
• The 24 mountains: Kun’s 45° hold Wei, Kun and Shen, from 202.5° to 247.5°; Kun itself, the middle one, is a mountain named after the trigram.

Across traditions

• In the Book of Changes Kun doubled is the 2nd hexagram, also called Kun, which Richard Wilhelm named the Receptive: earth upon earth, the strength of following and of carrying. Human Design’s Gate 2 is that hexagram.
• In Korea Kun is one of the four trigrams on the national flag, standing for the earth.
• In Western astrology earth is one of four elements, the element of the earth signs, practical and patient; the Chinese phase of Earth, which Kun carries, holds the centre and the turns between the seasons, a different idea set beside it, not the same.

Origin and history

The Book of Changes gives Kun more words than any trigram but Qian. Its Words on the Text, one of the Ten Wings, praise the earth’s “utmost yielding” that is yet firm when it moves, and the Discussion of the Trigrams gives Kun the belly among the parts of the body, the ox among the animals, the cloth, the cauldron, the great cart and the multitude among its images. In the Early Heaven arrangement, traced by the Song scholars to Fu Xi, Kun holds the north, facing Qian in the south; in the Later Heaven arrangement, which Feng Shui follows, it moves to the south-west.

The compass schools set it in the south-west of the luopan and made it, with Gen, Xun and Qian, one of the four corner trigrams among the 24 mountains. The Ba Zhai Ming Jing makes it the trigram of the second Kua, and of the yang count’s Kua 5; the Flying Stars, after Shen Zhureng, read its palace as the home of the 2.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune draws Kun from its three broken lines rather than from a font. The trigram holds the south-west in the Later Heaven order and carries the Lo Shu’s number 2: the yang count gives Kua 2 for a solar year such as 1980, 1989 or 1998, and for the years whose count would give 5, such as 1986, 1995 or 2004; the yin count gives it for 1987, 1996 or 2005.

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

Correspondences