The Water Trigram (Kǎn 坎)

Traditional associations

Attribute: Deep and dangerous
Family role: The middle son
Direction: North
Element: Water

The direction follows the Later Heaven arrangement and the element is a later Five Phases correspondence; other diagrams and interpretive traditions organize them differently. How the eight trigrams fit together.

Reading Kǎn

Kǎn is a single unbroken line in the middle, enclosed above and below. Its odd line sits at the centre, so the figure reads the same upside down, which only four of the eight do. Whatever is solid here is inside something, and that is the structural fact behind most of what gets said about it.

Water is the image, though the traditional readings mean water in a gorge or a pit before they mean water at rest. The quality attached to it is danger, and the sense runs closer to depth than to threat: something that has to be gone through. The Shuogua commentary reads that middle yang line as the middle son.

Hexagram 29 is Kǎn over Kǎn, and it carries the trigram name unchanged, as all eight doubled figures do. Its opposite is Lí, Fire, the same arrangement reversed. The two are read as a pair throughout the sequence, and hexagrams 63 and 64 are built from nothing else.

The 15 hexagrams built from Kǎn

Eight place it in the lower half and eight in the upper. Hexagram 29 appears in both, because it is Kǎn doubled.

As the lower trigram

lines 1–3, the inner or beginning half

As the upper trigram

lines 4–6, the outer half

Browse all 64 hexagrams, or cast your own reading with the three-coin method.