The I Ching, Legge tr.: Text Section II: XXXII. The H...

This is a classical commentary on Hexagram 32 (Hăng, "Duration" or "Perseverance") from the I Ching, almost certainly in James Legge's Victorian-era English translation, combining the traditional oracular judgments with analytical notes on each line. The hexagram's central argument is that genuine perseverance requires correct, steady action rather than restless striving — its overall judgment promises success and advantage, but only through firm adherence to proper conduct. The commentary interprets the hexagram's structure through the relationship of its two constituent trigrams, Sun (oldest daughter) and Kăn (oldest son), framing duration as a quality embodied in a mature, hierarchically ordered couple where the wife is submissive and the husband firm. A notable feature is the line-by-line analysis tying fortune or misfortune to each position's strength or weakness relative to its place — so the 5th line (weak, docile, responsive) is good for a wife but bad for a husband, revealing the text's explicitly gendered social ethics. The commentator (likely Legge) at one point distances himself from this application, doubting it reflects King Wăn's original intent and reframing the hexagram more abstractly as describing any inferior-superior relationship sustained by mutual correctness. Someone deciding whether to read the full text should know it is dense with structural I Ching logic (correlates, central positions, trigram symbolism) and requires familiarity with that interpretive tradition to follow its reasoning.

The I Ching, Legge tr.: Text Section II: XXXII. The H...

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