Two solid lines at top and bottom with four broken lines between them: the shape of an open mouth. Yi is about nourishment, what you take in and what you say, and it treats both as the same question.
Twenty-seventh in the King Wen order. The Sequence places it after The Taming Power of the Great: whatever has been accumulated then has to be nourished, and yi is the hexagram of feeding.
The Judgement runs roughly: Yi. Holding to this brings good fortune. Watch what nourishes; watch what a person is trying to fill their own mouth with.
The second half is the instruction and it has two objects. Look at how nourishment is provided, and look at what someone reaches for on their own account. The text does not say the second is bad. It says to look, which is a colder and more useful thing to ask of a reader. Most of this hexagram works by observation rather than prescription: you are asked to notice what is being taken in, by you and by others, before deciding anything about it.
The Image: thunder under the mountain. The noble person is careful with their words and moderate in eating and drinking.
The two halves of that instruction are the same instruction. What goes out of the mouth and what goes into it are treated as one discipline, which is a genuinely old idea and not a modern gloss. Thunder beneath a mountain is movement contained by something still, and the conduct it recommends is containment applied to the most ordinary daily things. There is nothing elevated about it. The recommendation is to watch your speech and your appetite, on the grounds that a person who cannot regulate those is unlikely to regulate anything larger.
Yi is one of the few hexagrams in the book that is a picture of itself. Solid lines at top and bottom, four broken lines in between: an open mouth seen from the side, with the jaw hinged at the bottom. The name means the cheeks or the corners of the mouth, and by extension nourishment.
The subject is what you take in. That covers food, and it covers everything else that gets consumed: information, company, argument, attention. The hexagram splits this into two questions that the Judgement puts side by side. Who is nourishing whom, and what is each person reaching for on their own account. The distinction is between provision and appetite. Those have different answers and the text wants both.
The line texts are unusually judgemental for this book. The bottom line describes someone abandoning something valuable of their own to stare at what someone else is eating, and calls it misfortune. Several middle lines describe nourishment coming from the wrong direction. The hexagram is not neutral about dependency. What changes with the question: asked about a habit, it points at the source rather than the quantity. Asked about a relationship, it asks which party is being fed and whether that arrangement was ever agreed.
In a relationship question Yi asks who is feeding whom. Not affection in general, but the actual traffic: who provides reassurance, who provides attention, who does the emotional resupply and whether it goes both ways.
The first line is the uncomfortable one. Someone puts down something valuable of their own in order to watch what another person has. That is a recognisable dynamic and the text gives it no sympathy at all. Where the question is about someone else's capacity to give, the hexagram declines to answer; it describes the exchange as observable behaviour, not as feeling. What can be checked is what actually moves between you in a normal week.
At work this is about what sustains the work rather than the work itself. Where the resources come from, who is being developed, whether the people doing the job are being fed anything or simply drawn on.
The sixth line is the useful one for anyone managing others. It describes being the source others draw from, says that awareness of the danger in that position brings good fortune, and then permits a serious undertaking. Being the provider is treated as legitimate and as precarious in the same breath. The hexagram has nothing to say about whether your particular role is secure, and it is not a forecast about a job.
In a money question Yi is about the source of income rather than the amount. What feeds you, whether that source is yours or someone else's, and whether the arrangement is one you chose.
The third line is severe: turning away from proper nourishment, persistence brings misfortune, do not act for ten years. Ten years is the book's way of saying a very long time, and it is attached here to depending on the wrong thing. That is a description of a pattern, not a prediction about your finances, and the hexagram gives no guidance on any actual decision. Anything with a number in it needs someone who can see your circumstances.
For one week, write down what you consume and what you say. Not to judge either, just to have the record. Yi works by observation, and the Judgement asks you to look twice: at what is feeding you, and at what you reach for on your own initiative. Most people are wrong about the second until they see it written down.
Yang in a yang place, correctly placed, and one of only two solid lines in the figure. The text is scornful: you abandon your own magic tortoise and watch me with your mouth hanging open. The tortoise was a divining shell, a thing of real value that also feeds itself. Someone with their own resources is staring at somebody else's plate. Changing it produces Hexagram 23, Splitting Apart, where the erosion is further along.
Yin in a yin place, correct and central, which ought to be a strong position, and the text is still negative. Nourishment comes from the wrong direction, and seeking it up the hill leads to misfortune if you set out. A yin line has nothing to give, so it must receive, and the two available sources are both structurally wrong. Correct placement does not help when the whole configuration is one of dependency. Changing it gives Hexagram 41, Decrease.
Yin in a yang place, incorrectly placed, and the harshest line in the hexagram. Turning away from nourishment; persisting brings misfortune; do not act for ten years; nothing is gained. Ten years in this book means an indefinitely long stretch rather than a count. The line describes feeding on something that does not nourish and continuing anyway, which is the one behaviour Yi condemns outright. Changing it produces Hexagram 22, Grace, where appearance substitutes for substance.
Yin in a yin place, correctly placed, and the same phrase as the second line about nourishment coming from the wrong direction, this time with good fortune attached. The difference is position: this line is in the upper trigram, close to the ruler, and receiving is appropriate there. The image is a tiger watching with a fixed stare and pressing desire, and the text still says no blame. Intensity of appetite is not the problem. Changing it gives Hexagram 21, Biting Through.
Yin in a yang place, so not correctly placed, though central in the upper trigram. The text says to turn from the usual course, that staying put and holding steady brings good fortune, and that one should not cross the great water. This is a ruler who cannot provide independently and must rely on the strong line above. The instruction is to stay within your actual capacity rather than attempt the large undertaking. Changing it produces Hexagram 42, Increase.
Yang in a yin place at the top, technically incorrect and functionally the most important line in the hexagram. Everything below draws on it. The text calls it the source of nourishment, says that awareness of danger brings good fortune, and then permits crossing the great water. Being the one everybody feeds from is powerful and exposed at once, and the good fortune is conditional on knowing that. Changing it produces Hexagram 24, Return.
The lower trigram is Zhen, Thunder; the upper is Gen, Mountain. Movement at the bottom, stillness at the top, which is exactly how a jaw works: the lower jaw moves and the upper one does not. The hexagram is a diagram before it is a symbol, and reading it as a picture explains more of the line texts than any commentary does.
The nuclear hexagram, from lines two to five, is Hexagram 2, The Receptive, six yin lines and pure receptivity. That is what sits inside Yi: underneath a figure about nourishment there is nothing but capacity to receive. It confirms the surface rather than contradicting it, which is unusual, and it explains why the middle lines are so consistently about dependence.
The inverse is Yi itself. Turn the figure upside down and it is unchanged, one of only eight hexagrams in the book with that property, and its opposite, Hexagram 28, Preponderance of the Great, is another. Hexagrams 29 and 30 complete the set of four in this stretch of the sequence. When inversion does nothing, the King Wen pairing falls back on line-for-line opposition instead.
The oldest layer is Zhou-era oracle text, in circulation by roughly the ninth century BCE. In this hexagram it is unusually vivid: a divining tortoise put aside, a mouth hanging open, a tiger with a fixed stare. These are omens recorded in concrete terms, and none of them is philosophy.
The Ten Wings, assembled between about the fourth and second centuries BCE, added the interpretive frame. The Image commentary is where the equation of speech with eating comes from, and it is one of the clearest examples in the book of a later editor turning an omen about food into a rule about conduct.
The Song philosophers extended it again. Cheng Yi in the eleventh century read Yi as the nourishing of virtue and made the hexagram largely about self-cultivation, which is the reading most modern books inherit without saying where it came from.
In English, James Legge's 1882 translation is public domain and closest to the literal Chinese; his notes are more useful than his prose. Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German, Englished by Cary Baynes in 1950, is the version in general circulation, and it reads the hexagram through a psychological lens the original does not have. Both are worth consulting and neither should be mistaken for the ninth-century BCE text underneath.
Yi gets read as a hexagram about diet. The Image does mention eating and drinking, and modern treatments run with it into nutrition advice. That is a category error twice over: the text is about the source and direction of nourishment rather than its content, and nothing in a bronze-age oracle constitutes guidance about what anyone should eat. If you want advice about food, this is not where it lives.
The second misreading is gentler and more common. Because the hexagram is about nourishment, it gets treated as warm, a figure about care and being looked after. Read the lines. Four of the six are negative, one describes someone abandoning their own resources to stare at another person's, and one prescribes doing nothing for ten years. This is a hexagram about dependency, and dependency is the thing it is worried about.
The third is the missing symmetry. Yi is its own inverse, which means the King Wen sequence pairs it with its line-for-line opposite instead. That pairing puts nourishment directly against Preponderance of the Great, a structure at breaking point. Reading Yi without noticing what it is defined against loses half of what the sequence is claiming.
Put a real question to the coins.