Heaven below, thunder above. Great power, and a hexagram almost entirely concerned with the damage it does unrestrained. It describes strength that is available, not strength that is being used well.
Thirty-fourth in the King Wen order, and one of the twelve waxing and waning hexagrams, where it marks the second month. The Sequence places it after Retreat: nothing can go on withdrawing for ever, so vigour follows it.
Legge's 1882 English is one line: Da Zhuang indicates that it will be advantageous to be firm and correct. That is the entire judgement, and it is the shortest in this stretch of the book.
The brevity is doing something. Four yang lines are rising and the figure carries more force than almost any other, and the text responds by saying nothing whatever about what that force can achieve. It supplies a condition and no promise. Set against the hexagrams around it the silence is pointed: where this much strength is available, the only thing worth saying is that correctness still matters.
The Image is thunder above heaven, and from it the noble person takes no step that is not according to propriety.
That is a strange thing to draw out of a storm. The natural picture is enormous noise in a high place, and the conduct recommended is meticulous attention to correct behaviour in small matters. The logic is a check. The more force a person has, the smaller the things that need watching, because at this scale nothing is private and every step is visible. Propriety here is not manners. It is the constraint that stops power from being the only thing anybody can see.
The Power of the Great is four yang lines rising under two yin. It is one of the strongest figures in the book by simple count, and it is unusual in how little it seems to enjoy that. The judgement offers a condition and nothing else, and four of the six lines concern a ram getting its horns caught in a fence.
What the hexagram describes is force that has arrived and has not yet found its shape. Heaven below is pure initiating strength; thunder above is movement and shock. Strength driving movement, with nothing anywhere in the figure doing the steering. The book's response is not to warn against power but to keep pointing out that power applied to an obstacle without judgement produces a stuck animal rather than an open gate.
It says nothing about whether the strength is deserved or the goal worth reaching. Its opposite, line for line, is Hexagram 20, Contemplation, which is almost all watching where this is almost all pushing. Asked what is available, this hexagram says a great deal. Asked what to do with it, it says very little, and that refusal is the most useful thing about it. A hexagram that declines to endorse the force it describes is doing the reader a service.
Strong feeling and strong will, in a situation where neither is being moderated. This is not the hexagram of a happy relationship. It is the hexagram of one with a great deal of force in it, which may be passion, conviction, or an argument that neither person will drop.
The recurring image is a ram that charges a fence and gets caught, and in a relationship question that is worth taking seriously as a description of what pressing harder actually produces. The figure does not counsel weakness. It counsels propriety, meaning the small correct behaviours that keep force from being the only thing in the room, and it is unusually direct that those are what goes missing when this hexagram appears.
A position of real strength: momentum, resources, a mandate, a case that is genuinely good. The hexagram turns up when somebody has the power to push and is deciding how hard to push.
Its advice is narrow and worth having. The strength is not in question, so the only remaining variable is conduct, and at this level of force conduct is what everything turns on. Where a spread asks whether to press an advantage, this figure says the advantage is real and the fence is also real, and it spends four of its six lines on what happens to something that charges without looking. It has no opinion about whether the goal is worth the force.
Substantial resources and the pressure to use them. Expansion, a large commitment, the point where a financial position is strong enough that doing nothing starts to feel like waste.
The hexagram is about restraint rather than caution, and the difference matters. It does not say the strength is illusory or the move wrong. It says force applied without regard for the shape of the obstacle gets stuck in it, and that at this scale errors are expensive because they are large. Nothing here amounts to advice about any particular decision, and the figure names no course of action.
Before you push, find out what the fence is actually made of. This hexagram's failure is not weakness or hesitation. It is force applied to a barrier nobody stopped to examine. Spend a day establishing what is really in the way and who put it there, then apply the strength you have to that rather than to the general direction of the problem. The strength is not the part at risk here; the horns are.
Strength showing in the toes, and Legge is blunt: advance will lead to evil, most certainly. It is the harshest verdict in the hexagram and it lands on the lowest line.
The reason is positional. This is a yang line correctly placed at the very bottom, so it is strong and also as far from any influence as a line can get, and it has no answering line at the fourth, which is yang as well. Force at the bottom with nothing above responding to it has no purchase. Changing it produces Hexagram 32, Duration.
Firm correctness brings good fortune, and that is all the text says. It is the only unqualified good line in the hexagram.
The structure explains why it can afford to be so short. The line is yang in a yin place, so it is technically incorrect, but it is central in the lower trigram and it answers the yin ruler at the fifth. Centrality outranks correctness here, and a strong line in a soft position is strength already being moderated by where it sits. Changing it gives Hexagram 55, Abundance.
The small man uses all his strength; the superior person's rule is not to. Then the image this hexagram is remembered for: a ram butting a fence and getting its horns caught.
The line is correct and strong at the top of the lower trigram, which is exactly the position that tempts. It has an answering line at the sixth and does not need to force anything, and it forces anyway. The text does not say the ram was wrong to want through. It says the horns are now stuck. Changing it produces Hexagram 54, The Marrying Maiden.
The fence opens and the horns are not caught. The strength is compared to a large waggon with strong axles, which is the one straightforwardly admiring image in the whole hexagram.
What changed is not the quantity of force but its placement. This is a yang line in a yin position, strength sitting in a yielding place, and the barrier gives way instead of catching. Changing it produces Hexagram 11, Peace, where heaven sits beneath earth and the two move through each other, which is the same lesson stated as a whole figure.
Losing the ram-like strength in the ease of the position, with no occasion for repentance. A line about a ruler who stops butting.
This is a yin line in the ruler's seat, a yang place, so it is soft where strength is expected, and it is central in the upper trigram. That is precisely why it can afford to let the ram go: it holds the fifth place and does not need force to keep it. The text treats losing the strength as a relief rather than a loss. Changing it gives Hexagram 43, Breakthrough, this figure's nuclear hexagram.
The ram is caught in the fence and can neither retreat nor advance. No advantage in any direction, and then the turn: if he grasps the difficulty, there will be good fortune.
That last clause is the whole hexagram in one line. The good fortune does not come from getting free. It comes from understanding the position. The line is correctly placed and answers the third, where the first charge happened, so the top of the figure is looking back at its own beginning. Changing it produces Hexagram 14, Possession in Great Measure.
The Power of the Great is 111100: four yang lines rising under two yin. Qian, the Heaven Trigram, is below, supplying force from inside the situation. Zhen, the Thunder Trigram, is above, supplying movement. Strength driving motion, with nothing in the figure doing any steering.
Turn it upside down and you have Hexagram 33, Retreat: the same six lines, with the strong ones giving ground instead of gaining it. The pair sits together in the sequence and is the clearest demonstration in the book that advance and withdrawal can be one figure read from two ends.
The nuclear hexagram, drawn from lines two to five, is Hexagram 43, Breakthrough, five yang lines with a single yin at the top. That is what the surface conceals, and it is the sharper reading: the real subject is not how much force there is but the one soft point everything is pressing against, and what happens when it gives.
Two of the six lines are yin and both sit at the top. Every warning in the text is addressed to one of the four below them, which is a detail worth carrying into any reading of the figure.
The Zhou-era layer here is agricultural and concrete. A ram, a fence, a waggon with strong axles. These are not metaphors a Bronze Age diviner reached for. They are the things in front of him, and the line texts are terse enough that most of what a modern reader hears in them has been supplied by commentary.
The Ten Wings, compiled across the Warring States and Han periods, added the commentary on the judgement, the Image, and the reading of the trigrams as thunder over heaven. The move from a stuck ram to a doctrine about propriety belongs entirely to that layer, several centuries later.
The English name has drifted furthest of anything here. Legge in 1882 gave The Great Being Strong, which is awkward and close to the Chinese. Wilhelm's German became The Power of the Great in Cary Baynes's 1950 English, which sounds like a title and reads as approval. The Chinese da zhuang is nearer to great vigour, and vigour in a hexagram whose central image is an animal with its horns caught is not obviously a compliment. The name arrived in English sounding like praise, and the text underneath it does not read that way at all.
The first misreading is reading the name. The Power of the Great sounds like a good result and querents receive it as a promise of success. Four of the six lines describe an animal getting stuck, and the judgement offers a condition with no outcome attached to it. The hexagram is about the possession of force, and it is markedly unenthusiastic about that.
The second is treating the ram as a warning against acting at all. It is not. The fourth line has the same strength and the fence opens, with nothing caught. The distinction the text draws is between force applied with attention to the obstacle and force applied at the obstacle in general, which is far more useful than push or do not push.
The third is missing who the warnings are for. Both yin lines sit at the top, and every cautionary line in the figure is one of the four yang below them. Anybody reading this hexagram as a description of a powerful obstacle has it backwards. In this figure the querent is usually the ram, and that is the reading most likely to be useful and least likely to be welcome.
Put a real question to the coins.