The Book of Changes · Bi

Hexagram 22: Grace

Mountain (the peak) over Fire (flame and the sun)

Form, decoration, the way a thing is presented. The tradition allows it real value in small matters and refuses it in large ones: grace can make something clearer and cannot make it true.

The image

Fire at the foot of the mountain, lighting it. The reading is that a person clears up the day's affairs by it and does not decide grave cases by it.

Mountain, above

Stillness, limit, and the place where a thing stops.

Fire, below

Clarity, attachment, and what depends on its fuel.

The six lines

Read from the bottom up.

1. Line 1Leaving the carriage and walking. Choosing the plain way on purpose.
2. Line 2Decoration with nothing underneath it yet. Grace in the beard.
3. Line 3Graceful and comfortable in it. Constancy is what keeps this from turning into vanity.
4. Line 4Plainness, and a white horse coming. Not a raider: someone arriving to ask.
5. Line 5The gift is embarrassingly small. Sincerity outlasts the size of it.
6. Line 6Grace in plain white. Ornament that has come all the way round to nothing.

The same figure in Human Design

Human Design took its sixty four gates from this book, in this numbering, so hexagram 22 is Gate 22, Openness.