Qián · Heaven

Three unbroken lines, and the only one of the eight with no yin in it.

Traditional associations

Attribute: Creative and strong
Family role: The father
Direction: Northwest
Element: Metal

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 Qián

Qián is three solid lines. It is the only one of the eight with no broken line in it, and most of what is said about the trigram follows from that: there is nothing in the figure that yields. The other seven mix yang and yin in some proportion. Qián does not, which is why it is usually read as initiative itself and not as the material something gets made from.

The English name is normally given as Heaven, though the image behind it is the sky, not heaven in a religious sense. In the traditional readings the trigram stands for movement that carries on without being restarted, so the strength meant here is persistence rather than force applied once.

Hexagram 1 is Qián twice over, six unbroken lines, and the figure the sequence opens with. Flip all six and you get Kūn, Earth, its opposite and the figure it is usually paired with. Position changes the reading too: in the lower half of a hexagram Qián suggests a situation driven from inside it, and in the upper half that the push is coming from outside.

The 15 hexagrams built from Qián

Eight place it in the lower half and eight in the upper. Hexagram 1 appears in both, because it is Qián 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.