The Earth Trigram (Kūn 坤)

Traditional associations

Attribute: Receptive and devoted
Family role: The mother
Direction: Southwest
Element: Earth

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 Kūn

Kūn is three broken lines. It reverses Qián in every position, and like Qián it is unmixed: nothing in the figure pushes. That is what makes the two a pair instead of a contest between a strong figure and a weak one. Qián is all initiative and Kūn all capacity to receive it.

The ground is the traditional image, and the quality attached to it is yielding, which is not quite the same as passivity. Earth in this sense carries what is put on it and gives it somewhere to happen. The Shuogua commentary assigns the eight trigrams family roles, and Kūn is the mother, the counterpart to Qián as father.

Stack it on itself and you have hexagram 2, six broken lines, second in the sequence. Kūn sits at one end of the whole set: every other trigram carries at least one line of each kind, and only these two do not. Inside a hexagram, Kūn below suggests a situation with room in it, and Kūn above circumstances that will take whatever is brought to them.

The 15 hexagrams built from Kūn

Eight place it in the lower half and eight in the upper. Hexagram 2 appears in both, because it is Kūn 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.