The Book of Changes · Ming Yi

Hexagram 36: Darkening of the Light

Earth (the field) over Fire (flame and the sun)

The sun gone under the earth. A time when being right is not safe to say, and the tradition's counsel is to keep the light rather than to shine it.

The image

Brightness sunk into the earth. The reading is that a person mixing with a crowd veils their brilliance and still does not lose it.

Earth, above

Yielding, carrying, and what receives without insisting.

Fire, below

Clarity, attachment, and what depends on its fuel.

The six lines

Read from the bottom up.

1. Line 1In flight with the wings hanging. Three days without eating, and people talk about it.
2. Line 2Wounded, and rescued, and the rescue has real strength behind it.
3. Line 3The leader is taken in the hunt. Do not expect it all to right itself at once.
4. Line 4Getting to the heart of it, and then out through the gate before it closes.
5. Line 5Hiding the light and keeping it lit. Constancy is the whole instruction here.
6. Line 6Not light but dark. Climbing to heaven first, and then falling.

The same figure in Human Design

Human Design took its sixty four gates from this book, in this numbering, so hexagram 36 is Gate 36, Crisis.