The Fire Trigram (Lí 離)

Traditional associations

Attribute: Clinging and bright
Family role: The middle daughter
Direction: South
Element: Fire

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 Lí

Lí is a broken line at the centre with unbroken lines above and below. Like Kǎn, its character comes from what sits in the middle. Here the middle is the gap: the figure is solid on the outside and empty within.

Fire is the image, and the quality usually given for it is clinging. Fire has no substance of its own and burns on what it holds to, which is the sense the name carries, not heat or destruction. Brightness belongs to the same idea, since what fire mainly does is make things visible. Its yin line at the centre makes it the middle daughter in the Shuogua scheme.

Hexagram 30 doubles it. Lí's opposite is Kǎn, Water, and together with Qián and Kūn those two make the four figures that turning over leaves unchanged. Hexagrams 63 and 64 are built from Lí and Kǎn alone, in the two possible orders, and they close the sequence.

The 15 hexagrams built from Lí

Eight place it in the lower half and eight in the upper. Hexagram 30 appears in both, because it is Lí 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.