Lesson 10
The Sequence: The Storyline of the Sixty-Four
From the opening of heaven and earth to a matter that is never quite finished, the Sequence strings the sixty-four into one story that spirals upward.
How the Sequence is written
The Sequence of the Hexagrams (Xùguà 序卦), one of the Ten Wings, explains why the sixty-four are arranged as they are. Its method is fixed: name the hexagram, gloss it with a single word, and link it to the one before. For example: “There are heaven and earth, and then the myriad things are born. What fills the space between heaven and earth is nothing but the myriad things; therefore Zhun follows. Zhun means fullness. Zhun is the first birth of things.” In a few lines Zhun carries two meanings, fullness and first birth, a reminder that a single word in the Yi often carries several.
When you read the Sequence, circle each hexagram name with a coloured pen, or the thread gets lost. Read it through once and the hexagrams you have met piecemeal suddenly connect into a living chain.
Keep a measure of reserve, though. The silk manuscript of the Zhouyi excavated at Mawangdui orders the hexagrams differently. If the order differs, must the Sequence be rewritten? The Sequence is a little like giving the answer and then supplying reasons; a smooth essay does not prove every step was inevitable. Its value lies not in proving the order but in showing a way of seeing change.
The Upper Classic: from Qian–Kun to Kan–Li, the way of heaven
The thirty hexagrams of the Upper Classic begin with Qian and Kun and end with Kan and Li: from heaven and earth to water and fire. Their emphasis is the unfolding of nature and the way of heaven.
Qian and Kun are heaven and earth. Once there are heaven and earth, things are born, so Zhun follows, the hardship of first birth. What is newly born is ignorant, so Meng follows. The young need nourishment, so Waiting, Xū 需, which the Sequence calls the way of food and drink. Where there is food there is contention, so Conflict. Contention raises crowds, so the Army. Step by step the story moves through survival, struggle and organisation until it reaches Peace and Obstruction: “Peace means passage. Things cannot pass forever; therefore Obstruction follows.” Smoothness cannot last; blockage comes after.
Further on come Stripping and Return: “Things cannot be exhausted to the end. When stripping reaches the top, it comes back below; therefore Return follows.” Yang is stripped to a single top line, and at the extreme it turns and comes back from below. Last come Kan and Li. Kan is sinking; a person who falls into danger must find something to cling to: “What sinks must cling to something; therefore Li follows. Li means clinging.” The Upper Classic closes here. Heaven and earth, sun and moon, water and fire: the basic frame of the cosmos is in place.
The Lower Classic: from Xian–Heng to the two Completions, human affairs
The thirty-four hexagrams of the Lower Classic begin with Xián 咸 and Héng 恆. Here the Sequence starts afresh: “There are heaven and earth, and then the myriad things; the myriad things, and then man and woman; man and woman, and then husband and wife; husband and wife, and then father and son; father and son, and then ruler and minister; ruler and minister, and then high and low; high and low, and then propriety and right have their place.” Xian, Influence, is the mutual attraction of a young man and a young woman; Heng, Duration, is the lasting bond of husband and wife. The Upper Classic opens with heaven and earth, the Lower with man and woman, and the focus shifts to the human world. The Doctrine of the Mean says the way of the jūnzǐ “begins with husband and wife”, which fits exactly.
The Lower Classic shows the Sequence's central idea most clearly: things reverse at the extreme, but not like a pendulum swinging back and forth. They spiral upward. After Duration comes Retreat: “Things cannot stay in their place forever; therefore Retreat follows.” After Retreat comes not a return to staying put but Great Strength: “Things cannot retreat forever; therefore Great Strength follows.” After Great Strength, not a return to retreat but Progress, Jìn 晉: “Things cannot be strong forever; therefore Progress follows.” Each turn between the two poles lifts you a level.
Life works the same way: the rules repeat, the content never does. Being deceived by a friend the first time and again five years later are different experiences, different feelings, different tricks. When we say someone has “fallen into the old habit again”, each fall happens in a different situation. The real question is: when will you wake up?
Why it ends on Before Completion
At the very end of the Lower Classic stand After Completion and Before Completion. The Sequence says: “One who surpasses things will surely succeed; therefore After Completion follows.” The matter is done. By ordinary logic, a book that reaches “completion” should stop there. Yet the Sequence adds one more: “Things cannot be exhausted; therefore it ends with Before Completion.” The development of things never runs out, so the sixty-four close on Wèijì 未濟, not yet complete.
This is one of the deepest arrangements in the whole book. Lesson 3 showed that After Completion has every line in place and still warns “auspicious at the start, disorder at the end”. Lesson 7 showed that its nuclear hexagram is Before Completion. Completion contains incompletion. To end on After Completion would declare that change had stopped. To end on Before Completion says change goes on: the end of one cycle is the start of the next, and the book called Change lives up to its name.
Before Completion is not failure. Its judgment says “success”. Fire is above and water below, fire rising and water sinking, and every line is out of place; nothing has settled yet. But precisely because nothing has settled, there is still room to work and still reason to hope. For any reader that is the best reminder of all: whatever hexagram you are in right now, the story is not finished.
物不可窮也，故受之以未濟終焉。
《序卦傳》
Things cannot be exhausted; therefore it ends with Before Completion.
- The Sequence glosses each name in a word and links it to the previous one; useful, but not proof of the order (the Mawangdui manuscript differs).
- The Upper Classic's thirty run from Qian–Kun to Kan–Li, heaven and earth to water and fire: the way of heaven.
- The Lower Classic's thirty-four run from Xian–Heng to the two Completions, beginning with man and woman: human affairs.
- Reversal at the extreme spirals upward (Duration, Retreat, Great Strength, Progress); the book ends on Before Completion because “things cannot be exhausted”.