Li · Fire

Meaning

Li ☲ is fire: a broken, yin line held between two whole ones, bright on the outside and open at the heart, as a flame is hollow at its centre and needs something to cling to in order to burn. The Discussion of the Trigrams gives it one word, clinging, and sets it in the south at midsummer, the place of brightness, where, it says, all things see each other; the sage, it adds, turns to the south to hear the world. In the family of the trigrams it is the middle daughter, the yin line in the middle place.

The tradition reads in it brightness and clarity, warmth, and the gift of seeing and being seen: understanding that lights a room, a presence others gather round, the courage to show what one is. Its difficulty is the fire’s own, burning too fast, needing to be seen more than to see, a heat that flares and then has nothing left to hold. Fire lasts by what it clings to: the Book of Changes says that brightness is kept by tending it, as one tends a cow.

Its opposite is Kan ☵, water, the middle son: firm inside where Li is open, soft outside where Li is bright. Water over fire makes Ji Ji, “after completion”, and fire over water Wei Ji, “before completion”, the last two hexagrams of the Book of Changes.

In practice

• The Kua number: Li is Kua 9, of the East group. Its four supportive directions are the east (Growth), the south-east (Restoration), the north (Harmony) and the south, its own place (Stability).
• A Li house: a home sitting in the south and facing north is a Li house of the East group.
• The Flying Stars: the south is the Li palace, home of the 9 Purple, You Bi, the star of celebration, recognition and joy, and the star of Period 9, from 2024 to 2043, the period we are in.
• The 24 mountains: Li’s 45° hold Bing, Wu and Ding, from 157.5° to 202.5°; Wu, due south, is the Horse’s branch, and the Grand Duke’s mountain in 2026.
• The year: a Monkey, Rat or Dragon year sends the Three Killings to the south, as in 2028; the classics suggest facing them rather than sitting with them at one’s back.

Across traditions

• In the Book of Changes Li doubled is the 30th hexagram, fire upon fire, which Richard Wilhelm named the Clinging: two lights, one after the other, as the sun rises each day. Human Design’s Gate 30 is that hexagram.
• In Korea Li is one of the four trigrams on the national flag, standing for fire and the sun.
• In Western astrology fire is one of the four elements, the element of the fire signs, enthusiasm and will; the middle of Li’s season is the summer solstice, when the Sun enters Cancer, a water sign: 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 Li the eye among the parts of the body and the pheasant among the animals, and images of brightness and of hard shells round a soft middle: the sun, lightning, armour and helmets, the tortoise, the crab and the snail, a tree dry at its top. In the Early Heaven arrangement, which Shao Yong and the Song scholars traced to Fu Xi, Li stands in the east, where the sun rises, facing Kan; in the Later Heaven arrangement, traced to King Wen, which Feng Shui follows, it holds the south.

Richard Wilhelm’s translation of 1924 named it “the Clinging”. The compass schools set it in the south of the luopan, the top of the plate as Chinese diagrams are drawn, and the Ba Zhai Ming Jing makes it the trigram of the ninth Kua; the Flying Stars, after Shen Zhureng, read its palace as the home of the 9.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune draws Li from its lines, whole, broken and whole from the bottom up, rather than from a font. The trigram holds the south in the Later Heaven order and carries the Lo Shu’s number 9, which makes it Kua 9: the yang count gives it for a solar year such as 1982, 1991, 2000 or 2009, the yin count for 1985, 1994 or 2003, each year turning at Lichun.

Its directions follow from the lines. The east’s Zhen differs from Li in its top line alone, Growth; the south-east’s Xun in its two lower lines, Restoration; the north’s Kan in all three, Harmony. The four trigrams of the West group give Li’s four challenging directions.

Correspondences