One broken line under two solid. Xun is the trigram of wind and of wood: influence that works by continuing rather than by force. It describes gradual penetration, and it is slow enough to be missed.
The judgement belongs to Hexagram 57, The Gentle, and it is unusually modest about what it offers.
In Legge's 1882 English there is some little attainment and progress, advantage in movement in whatever direction, and advantage in seeing the great man. The word to notice is little. Most judgements in this book claim rather more than this one does. What it describes is influence that works, at a small scale, in any direction, and that needs an authority to attach itself to before it amounts to anything. That is an honest account of how gradual persuasion actually operates, and it is not a flattering one.
The Image is winds following one another, and from it the noble person repeats his instructions and sees the work carried out.
The picture is one gust after another rather than a storm, and the conduct drawn from it is repetition. Say it again. The text is not recommending nagging; it is observing that influence of this kind works through consistency of message over time, and that a thing said once has not really been said. There is a cost buried in the image and the book does not hide it. Something that works by continuous pressure is hard to distinguish from something that works by wearing people down, and the figure offers no test for telling them apart.
Xun is one broken line at the bottom with two solid above it. The Shuo Gua gives it wind and wood, the eldest daughter, the fowl, the thighs, the direction southeast, whiteness, length and height, advance and retreat, indecision, and the quality ru, which means to enter. The two natural images belong together: wind gets everywhere and wood grows into things, and neither does it by force.
In a reading Xun is influence, gradual penetration, and the effect of small persistent pressure. As the lower trigram it means the querent's own influence is working quietly at the base of the situation. As the upper trigram it means something is working on them the same way, and the giveaway is that they may not have noticed when it started.
The Shuo Gua also gives it indecisiveness, which sits oddly beside penetration until you look at the figure: the single yin line is at the bottom, so the trigram's foundation is the yielding part. What Xun does not describe is a decisive act. Its opposite line for line is Zhen, and the contrast between them is the most useful one in the system: a single event nobody can ignore against continuous pressure nobody registers. Asked what to do, Xun says keep going and stay consistent. Asked how long for, it says nothing.
Influence rather than declaration. Xun describes the slow work of two people shaping each other, the accumulated effect of small habits, and the way a relationship's terms get set without anybody having negotiated them.
As the lower trigram the querent is the one doing the shaping. As the upper trigram it is being done to them. That second reading is worth sitting with, because gradual influence is genuinely hard to see from inside, and the trigram is neutral about whether it is benign. The same figure covers a person patiently making room for someone and a person slowly getting their way. Which one it is is not in the trigram, and a reading that assumes the gentler option has chosen rather than read.
Work that proceeds by influence: persuasion, negotiation, culture, the long process of getting an organisation to do something it did not want to do. Xun below means the querent is applying the pressure. Xun above means it is being applied to them.
The trigram favours consistency and small repeated moves over a decisive push, and the judgement's own word for what that achieves is little. This is not discouragement. It is a claim about scale: the method works, it works slowly, and it will not produce a step change. Where a spread asks whether to force the issue, Xun is describing the alternative rather than endorsing it, and the choice between them belongs to the rest of the figure.
Small repeated financial effects rather than events. Costs that accumulate, savings that compound, a position that has drifted over a long period without any single decision moving it.
The useful contribution of this trigram in a money question is that it points at duration rather than amount. Something has been going on for a while. Whether it is good or bad is not in the figure, and the honest next step is to look at a long enough run of the actual numbers to see the trend, which is a thing a person can do and a reading cannot. Nothing here is financial advice.
Say it again, the same way, to the same person. This trigram's method is consistency over time rather than one well-chosen intervention, and its characteristic failure is abandoning a message after a single attempt because that attempt did not visibly land. Decide what you are going to keep repeating and how long you will keep repeating it before you conclude anything, and set that limit now, in writing, rather than in the moment when you are tired of saying it.
Xun is 011: one yin line at the bottom, two yang above it. Everything about the trigram follows from where that soft line sits. It is at the foundation, underneath, which is exactly how something gets in.
Turn the figure over and the yin line moves to the top. That is Dui, the Lake Trigram, where the opening is at the surface rather than at the base. Xun and Dui are the second of the two inversion pairs among the eight trigrams. Xun's opposite, line for line, is Zhen.
The single yin line is easiest to see in a figure that is otherwise solid. Xun below Qian gives Hexagram 44, Coming to Meet: five yang lines with one yin arriving underneath them, and the text treats that one line with considerable wariness. Swap the order, Qian below and Xun above, and you have Hexagram 9, The Taming Power of the Small, where the same single yielding line restrains something far larger than itself from above. One yin line, two positions, and the difference between infiltration and restraint.
Doubled, the influence is applied twice and the hexagram turns to the question of how long to keep going. The trigram alone never raises it.
The Zhou-era layer, roughly ninth to eighth century BCE, contains no trigram theory at all, and the material behind Xun is practical: wind, wood, offerings, going somewhere. The abstraction came later.
It arrives with the Ten Wings, compiled across the Warring States and Han periods. The Shuo Gua is where Xun acquires the eldest daughter, the fowl, the thighs, whiteness, length, and the pairing of wind with wood that no other trigram has. That pairing is genuinely odd and the commentary never explains it, which is worth noting, because most modern books present the two images as though they obviously belong together.
The same wing also assigns Xun advance and retreat and indecision, alongside penetration. Han commentators were untroubled by that: they were building a system of correspondences rather than a consistent character. English readers, arriving by way of Legge in 1882 and Wilhelm in 1924, tend to expect each trigram to have one coherent personality, and Xun is the clearest case where that expectation does not survive contact with the sources.
There is a practical reason the wood reading matters. In the Later Heaven arrangement Xun sits in the southeast and is routinely glossed as wind, but a large amount of traditional commentary on hexagrams containing it reads the trigram as wood or as a tree, particularly where growth or slow structural work is at issue. A reader who has only been given wind will find those passages confusing, and the confusion is in the English summaries rather than in the sources.
The first misreading is gentleness. The doubled hexagram is called The Gentle in English, and readers take the trigram as mild, accommodating and safe. The Chinese quality is ru, to enter. Wind gets into places that were closed, and wood splits stone by growing. This is a description of how something penetrates, not of how nicely it behaves.
The second follows from the first. Because Xun sounds benign, readers rarely ask who is being influenced. When it is the upper trigram, the honest reading is frequently that something is working on the querent slowly enough that they have not registered it, and that is an uncomfortable thing to say out loud. Softening it into gentle guidance removes the only warning in the figure.
The third is impatience with its scale. The judgement says little attainment, and readers treat that as a poor result. It is an accurate description of a method that works by accumulation. Reading it as failure tends to produce abandoning the approach one repetition before it would have mattered, which is the specific error the Image was written against.
Put a real question to the coins.