A Discourse on the Subtle Meaning of the Six

Liù wēi zhǐ dà lùn

The way of heaven, Huang Di begins, is too far to hold: it is like a floating cloud that comes to meet you, and like looking down into a deep abyss. The abyss can still be fathomed; of the cloud no one knows the end. He has heard his master say, again and again, that one must attend reverently to the way of heaven, and he has laid the saying away — and privately he doubts it. So he asks for the six-six divisions of the way of heaven, and for what waxes and wanes in them. Qi Bo answers with a ring. Above and below have their positions; left and right have their records. To the right of lesser yang, yang brightness governs; to the right of yang brightness, greater yang; to the right of greater yang, ceasing yin; to the right of ceasing yin, lesser yin; to the right of lesser yin, greater yin; to the right of greater yin, lesser yang again. This is the tip of the qi, and one reads it facing south, waiting — shifting the shadow to fix the positions, standing square. Then the same six are given from above: fire governs lesser yang, dryness governs yang brightness, cold governs greater yang, wind governs ceasing yin, heat governs lesser yin, damp governs greater yin — and each has a qi seen in the middle. That is the root. Below the root is what is seen in the middle; below that is the tip. Root and tip are not the same, and so the images the qi answers with are not the same either. Then comes the art of timing, which is what the chapter is for. The season arrives and the qi arrives with it: harmony. The season arrives and the qi does not: the qi that comes falls short. The season has not come and the qi arrives before it: the qi is in surplus. What answers to the season is accord, what does not is counterflow, and counterflow breeds change and change breeds illness. The answer shows itself in growing things, and in the qi and the pulse. The geography follows. To the right of the manifest brightness is the position of sovereign fire; from there one retires a step to minister fire, and then advances step by step through earth, metal, water and wood, and back to sovereign fire. Under each of the six, another bears down on it: water under minister fire, earth under water, wind under earth, metal under wind, fire under metal, and the yin essence under sovereign fire. Huang Di asks why, and gets the sentence the whole tradition afterwards quotes: when it is excessive there is harm; what bears it down then restrains it; with restraint there is generation and transformation. In its own position the qi is correct and the change is slight; out of its position it is evil and the change is severe. So to the years that meet. The wood circuit meeting mao, fire meeting wu, earth meeting the end of the four seasons, metal meeting you, water meeting zi — these are year meetings, years of level qi. Where the circuit of the year also meets the qi seen above it, the Celestial Primordial Register calls it a heaven tally; where a heaven tally and a year meeting fall together, it is the great unity. The three are then graded like offices: the heaven tally is the holder of the law, the year's position the issuer of commands, the great unity the honoured one — and being struck by them gives, respectively, an illness swift and perilous, slow and lingering, or sudden and fatal. When sovereign and minister change places, the one is accord and the other counterflow: that is what the two fires mean. The last third measures the year itself. A step is sixty degrees and a remainder; twenty-four steps heap up a surplus of a hundred ke, and that makes a day. Positions have an end and a beginning, the qi has an initial and a middle, and above and below are sought differently. The qi of heaven begins at jia, the qi of earth at zi, and the two joined are called the standing of the year. And then the numbers: in a jia zi year the six qi begin and end at such and such a ke, in a yi chou year at others, in bing yin and ding mao again others — four years of them, after which the wu chen year begins again at the first ke, and that round of four is one ji. Hence the years group by threes: yin, wu and xu together; mao, wei and hai together; chen, shen and zi together; si, you and chou together. What is all this for? Speaking of heaven, seek the root; speaking of earth, seek the position; speaking of the human being, seek the meeting of the qi — for between the positions above and below, where the qi meet, is where the human being dwells. Above the heavenly pivot the qi of heaven governs, below it the qi of earth, and in the region between them the qi of the human follows and the ten thousand things go by it. The initial is thirty degrees and a remainder, and the middle follows the same rule; the initial is the qi of earth, the middle the qi of heaven, and that is how the two are told apart. Rising and falling are heaven and earth taking turns; what has risen descends and belongs to heaven, what has descended rises and belongs to earth, and from high and low calling to one another, change is made. The close is the most quoted passage in the chapter. Cold and damp meet, dryness and heat face one another, wind and fire come together; the qi has prevalence and revenge, and where there is change evil qi dwells. A thing is born of transformation and reaches its extreme through change; success and ruin lean and hide within movement, and when movement does not cease, change arises. If exit and entry are abandoned the spirit mechanism perishes, and if rising and falling cease the qi that stands is isolated and in peril: without them there is no being born, growing, maturing, ageing and ending, and no being born, growing, transforming, gathering and storing. No vessel is without them. Hence it is said that without form there is no affliction — and the one who neither generates nor transforms is the true person, who is one with the way.