A lake resting in a hollow on a mountain. Xian is mutual influence, the kind that works below deliberation. The six lines run up the body from toe to tongue, and the text is careful about which parts it trusts.
Thirty-first in the King Wen order and the first of the lower canon. The Sequence restarts here: heaven and earth exist, then male and female, then husband and wife, and xian is the mutual attraction between them.
The Judgement runs roughly: Xian. Things go through. It pays to hold to this. Taking a wife brings good fortune.
Marriage is the example rather than the subject. What the text is describing is a relation in which two parties genuinely affect each other, and in the society that produced it marriage was the standard case of two separate things becoming mutually responsive. The reason it opens the second half of the book matters here: the upper canon begins with heaven and earth, the lower canon begins with two people. Whatever else Xian is about, the Judgement treats reciprocal influence as the foundation of the human half of the sequence rather than as a minor topic within it.
The Image: a lake on the mountain. The noble person receives others by being empty.
A lake on a mountain sits in a hollow. It exists because something was scooped out, and the water collects in the space rather than on the rock. The conduct that follows is the emptiness, not the water. What is recommended is a receptive capacity deliberately maintained: making room, not being persuasive. This is the opposite of what most people mean by influence in English, where the word describes something you exert. In Xian the influence is a property of the shape you hold, and the person who can be affected is the one able to affect anything.
Xian opens the lower canon, the second half of the King Wen sequence, and its subject is influence between two things that remain distinct. There is a philological point here that most English treatments omit and it is worth the space. The character used for the hexagram's name is the character for feeling with the heart element removed. Whether that was deliberate or a scribal accident is argued about, but the reading it produced is old and consistent: influence operating below conscious feeling.
The six lines run up a human body. Big toe, calves, thighs, then the heart, then the flesh of the back, then the jaw and tongue. It is the most systematic body sequence in the book and the verdicts are not what a modern reader expects: the low parts are premature, the high parts are unreliable, and the two places the text trusts are the middle.
That structure carries the argument. Influence that shows only in the extremities is either too early or merely verbal. What the hexagram approves is response that has reached far enough into a person to be involuntary, and it is sceptical of anything that stops at the mouth. What changes with the question: asked whether something is mutual, the hexagram gives you a way of checking. Asked how to make someone respond, it declines, and the Image explains why.
This is the hexagram people most want to be about love, and it partly is. Xian describes attraction that is genuinely mutual, two people whose responses have started to affect each other without either deciding to. The Judgement's approval of marriage puts it squarely in this territory.
What the lines add is a test rather than a promise. Influence in the toes is too early to mean anything. Influence in the tongue is talk. The line the text likes best describes something reaching the back, a place a person cannot see or control. If the question is whether someone feels the same way, this hexagram is unusually willing to say that the honest answer is found in what neither of you is managing.
At work Xian is influence without authority: the person whose opinion moves a room without holding the power to decide anything. It also covers responsiveness in the other direction, an organisation that actually changes when it hears something.
The fourth line is the working one and it is the least comfortable. Holding steady brings good fortune, remorse goes; but then a restless going back and forth, and only the friends you consciously fix your thoughts on will follow. The text is describing deliberate persuasion and marking it as the weaker form. Influence that has to be aimed reaches only what it aims at. The hexagram says nothing about whether your standing is secure.
In a money question Xian is a weak fit, and saying so is more useful than forcing it. The hexagram is about responsiveness between people, not about resources. Where it applies at all, it points at arrangements that depend on goodwill: an informal agreement, a rate held because of a relationship, terms that exist because someone likes working with you.
What it can usefully ask is whether that responsiveness runs both ways or only one. It offers no view on amounts, no signal about any decision, and nothing that should be treated as financial guidance. That belongs to your records and to someone qualified to read them.
Stop trying to produce the response and make room for it instead. Concretely: in the next conversation that matters, ask one question and then do not fill the silence after the answer. Try it once. The Image's instruction is emptiness, and emptiness in practice is the space you do not occupy. What arrives in it is the only influence this hexagram counts.
Yin in a yang place, incorrectly placed, at the very bottom. Influence reaches the big toe, and the text gives no verdict at all. Nothing follows from a toe. The stirring is real and it is too far from anything that decides to matter yet, which is why the line is neither approved nor warned against. Changing it produces Hexagram 49, Revolution, where a small first movement has become a complete overturning.
Yin in a yin place, central and correct, and still given misfortune. Influence reaches the calves; misfortune; staying put brings good fortune. Calves move a body without being asked, and the text treats that as the problem. A correctly placed line is warned specifically against acting on an impulse that has arrived in the part of the body least able to evaluate it. Changing it produces Hexagram 28, Preponderance of the Great.
Yang in a yang place, correctly placed, and criticised anyway. Influence reaches the thighs; it holds to whatever it is following; going on brings humiliation. Thighs carry a body wherever it was already headed. The fault named is not desire but following, the absence of any judgement of your own about where you are being taken. Correct placement earns no protection. Changing it produces Hexagram 45, Gathering Together, where the crowd becomes the subject.
Yang in a yin place, incorrectly placed, and positioned where the heart would be. This is the longest line in the hexagram and the only one that mentions thought. Holding steady brings good fortune and remorse disappears; then restless movement back and forth, and only the friends you fix your thoughts on follow. Deliberate influence is permitted here and quietly demoted: it works, and it reaches only its targets. Changing it produces Hexagram 39, Obstruction.
Yang in a yang place, central and correct, the ruling line. Influence reaches the flesh of the back, and there is no remorse. The back is the part of yourself you cannot see, cannot reach and cannot arrange, and the text puts the ruler's influence exactly there. No good fortune is promised, only the absence of regret, which is the appropriate verdict for something that happened without your involvement. Changing it produces Hexagram 62, Preponderance of the Small.
Yin in a yin place at the top, correctly placed, and the text is six words with no verdict: influence in the jaws, cheeks and tongue. That is talking. After five lines climbing the body, the hexagram arrives at the mouth and simply stops, declining to say whether it is good or bad. The omission is the comment. Influence that has got no further than speech is left to stand there unassessed. Changing it produces Hexagram 33, Retreat.
The lower trigram is Gen, Mountain; the upper is Dui, Lake. A lake resting in a hollow at the top of a mountain, which is a real feature of landscape and an unusual one. Gen is the trigram of stopping and Dui the trigram of pleasure and open surfaces, so the figure is stillness underneath and receptivity above. Nothing in it is pushing.
The nuclear hexagram, from lines two to five, is Hexagram 44, Coming to Meet, which is about an encounter with something whose influence should not be underestimated, and which the tradition treats with real suspicion. That is a sharp thing to find inside a hexagram about mutual attraction. It suggests that being open to influence and being susceptible to it are structurally the same condition.
The inverse is Hexagram 32, Duration, the figure directly after it: turn Xian over and you get the hexagram of what lasts. Attraction and endurance are the King Wen sequence's opening pair for the human half of the book, in that order. The opposite, every line reversed, is Hexagram 41, Decrease.
The Zhou oracle layer, roughly ninth century BCE, gives the body sequence: toe, calves, thighs, back, jaw. Reading omens from parts of the body was ordinary divinatory practice, and the ascending order here is systematic enough that it was probably designed rather than collected.
The philology is the interesting part of this hexagram's history. The name character is the character for feeling minus its heart element. Classical commentators read the omission as significant, taking Xian to mean influence that operates without conscious feeling, and that reading is at least two thousand years old. Modern philologists are more cautious, since early Chinese writing was not standardised and the two characters may simply have been interchangeable.
The Ten Wings, from about the fourth to second centuries BCE, supplied the Image with its instruction about receiving people through emptiness, and the placement of Xian at the head of the lower canon carries its own commentary: the second half of the book begins with a relation between two people.
James Legge's 1882 English is public domain and translates the name flatly. Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German, into English by Cary Baynes in 1950, titles it Influence and adds the parenthesis Wooing, which has pushed English readings hard toward romance and away from the wider sense the Chinese carries.
Xian is read as the love hexagram, and that reading is not wrong so much as narrow. Wilhelm's subtitle did a great deal of the damage. The Judgement's marriage clause is an example of mutual influence in the society that produced the text, not a restriction of the subject to romance. The same hexagram describes a negotiation in which both sides actually move, or a person who changes their mind because of something they heard.
The second misreading turns it into a hexagram about persuasion, which reverses the Image. Being empty is the instruction. English speakers hear influence as something exerted on other people, and read Xian as a licence to work on someone. The fourth line is the text's own comment on that: aim your thoughts and you will reach the people you aimed at, which the line frames as a limitation rather than a technique.
The third is what happens to the body lines. Because the toe and the tongue are undignified, commentaries often skip them or turn them into abstractions. They are the argument. The hexagram distrusts influence at the extremities and trusts it in the back, a part of a person that cannot be posed. Removing the anatomy to make the hexagram more elevated removes the only test it offers.
Put a real question to the coins.