Zhèn · Thunder

One solid line at the bottom, under two broken ones.

Traditional associations

Attribute: Arousing and moving
Family role: The eldest son
Direction: East
Element: Wood

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 Zhèn

Zhèn has a single unbroken line, and it sits at the bottom. Six of the eight trigrams are defined by where their one odd line falls, and this is the lowest that line can go: a yang line entering underneath, with everything above it still open. The movement it describes starts low and has not yet met anything.

Thunder is the image, and what the traditional readings take from it is the shock at the start of a storm. In the Shuogua scheme the three trigrams with a single yang line are the sons, ordered by how high that line sits, which makes Zhèn the eldest.

Doubled, Zhèn gives hexagram 51. Flip all three lines and you get Xùn, Wind, its opposite, whose single line is broken and also at the bottom. Turn Zhèn upside down instead and you get Gèn, Mountain, where the same solid line has moved to the top and the movement has stopped.

The 15 hexagrams built from Zhèn

Eight place it in the lower half and eight in the upper. Hexagram 51 appears in both, because it is Zhèn 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.