Water upon Water

When trouble comes in waves, what keeps you going?

Original

習坎：有孚，維心亨，行有尚。彖曰：……水流而不盈，行險而不失其信。維心亨，乃以剛中也。……險之時用大矣哉！象曰：水洊至，習坎；君子以常德行，習教事。

In plain words

Water upon water. Be sincere: the heart gets through, and going on brings honour. The Tuan Commentary says: … Water flows on and never fills up; it passes through danger without losing its good faith. “The heart gets through” because the strong lines sit in the centre. … Great indeed is the timely use of danger! The Image says: Water comes again and again: water upon water. The noble person keeps virtue constant and practises the work of teaching.

Key words

習xíDoubled; also, to practise again and again.
孚fúSincerity; being trustworthy all the way through.
坎kǎnA pit; the trigram of water and danger.

Reading it step by step

Themes I and II showed how to consult the I Ching and what can go wrong when something begins. But life isn't only hard at the start. Halfway along come the real obstacles: illness, a lost job, a relationship that breaks, being misunderstood, a problem that drags on for years. The Great Commentary asks, “Did the makers of the Changes know sorrow?” The people who wrote the I Ching were writing from inside trouble. For eight pages we watch how the Changes walks with a person through hard times. One sentence runs through them all: you can't choose the situation, but you can choose your response.

We begin with Kan (the Abyss, or Water). Kan is water, and here it is doubled: water upon water, danger inside danger.

First: “xi” means doubled, and it means practice. Each of the eight trigrams doubles into a hexagram, but only Kan gets an extra word in its name: Xi Kan. One reading says the word warns you that the danger is twofold. Another, more hopeful, takes xi in its everyday sense: practise, again and again. A woodcutter who climbs the mountain every day walks the cliff path like a road. Someone raised by the sea walks into the waves as if walking home. The same danger is smaller for someone who has practised.

Second: learn from water. The commentary says water “flows on and never fills up; it passes through danger without losing its good faith.” When water meets a pit, it doesn't argue with the pit. It fills it and flows on. It never stops, and a hard road never turns it into something else. Day and night it keeps its nature: that is its good faith. The Great Image asks the noble person to keep virtue constant and keep practising, steady like water, not two steps forward and one back.

meets a pitdoesn't fight it

fills itno skipping ahead

flows onnever stops

keeps faithstays what it is

Flowing on, never full: a hard place is to pass through, not to live in.

Third: the way out runs through the heart. The Judgment says, “Be sincere: the heart gets through.” The word heart almost never appears in a Judgment. Look at the six lines: both yang lines sit in the middle of their trigrams, a firm core inside all that water. The situation may not have changed yet, but once the heart has found its way through, you won't panic. The commentary even adds that danger has its uses: walls and moats are dangers too, and they protect a city.

Bring it into today: months of overtime, one rejection after another, caring for a sick parent. Trouble rarely comes one piece at a time. Instead of waiting for a life with no danger in it, treat each obstacle as practice, and keep your heart honest and steady.

Water isn't afraid of the pit. It just keeps flowing.

One line to carry

Water isn't afraid of the pit. It keeps flowing.

Today's question

What lately has felt like one obstacle after another? If you treated it as practice, what would you be practising?

Quick check

According to Kan's Judgment, what gets you through danger upon danger?

Next pageThe Dry LakePage 17

III · When Things Are Hard — You can't choose the situation; you can choose the response

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