The I Ching, Legge tr.: The Yî King Text: Section I...

This is a classical Chinese divinatory text presenting Hexagram 24 (Fû/Fu, "Return") from the *I Ching* (Book of Changes), accompanied by a 19th-century Western scholarly commentary in the tradition of James Legge's translation. The hexagram's core argument is that return and renewal are natural and inevitable: after a period of decay (represented by the preceding hexagram Po), one strong yang line reasserts itself beneath five yielding yin lines, symbolizing the cyclical recovery of positive force — illustrated astronomically by the winter solstice, when the sun begins its return northward. Each of the six individual line readings prescribes a fate (from great good fortune for early, modest correction to catastrophic defeat for the obstinate who refuses to return to the proper path), offering a graduated moral lesson that timely self-correction is auspicious while prolonged error compounds into disaster. The commentary makes the distinctive claim that this hexagram encodes a philosophy of historical change: political and social decline, like natural decay, inevitably gives way to recovery, though the text explicitly resists utopian readings — "there is nothing in the Yî to suggest the hope of a perfect society." The "seven days" formula is explained through a numerological sequence of six preceding hexagrams representing six months of yin's rise, with Fû as the seventh marking yang's return, treating a day as a metaphor for a month.

The I Ching, Legge tr.: The Yî King Text: Section I...

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