Yang-Rén-Yin-Rén
The yang comes out of its hidden place and stretches.
What was piled up loosens into warmth, and things are all glad.
1
He is happy by himself and thoroughly.
It does not reach past his own arms.
He is drowning in there and calling it pleasure.
2
A gladness nobody can point to.
It keeps time with the sky.
Nobody knows that anything was done.
3
Not settled and not decent — hooting, cackling.
Then the wailing, propped up in the doorway.
The rites went and the music went with them.
4
He brushes the tethers off, he cuts the cord.
The heart goes free.
There is nothing false in the gladness.
5
Bells and drums going, pipes and strings going.
Something thin has got into the sound.
The grief was already inside the music.
6
A gladness with no seam anywhere in it.
People, spirits, birds and beasts all at play.
There is nothing it does not gather in.
7
The living are laughing and so are the dead.
Heaven has set a date for it.
The laughing is what tells you it is over.
8
He laughs, and something in him is afraid.
The fault goes, and the worry with it.
He keeps himself by not trusting the laughing.
9
Gladness taken all the way to its edge.
The day does not even turn before the grief.
Then the weeping, and the sound people make.
THE IMAGE
An imperial spring music garden filled with bronze chime bells (bianzhong), stone chimes (bianqing), and zithers playing harmonious melodies beneath blossoming peach and cherry orchards, surrounded by dancing cranes and celebratory festive banners.
THE COMMENTARY
Pleasure, relief, celebration, or emotional openness is present, or becoming possible. The oracle does not distrust joy, but it asks whether the gladness is deep enough to connect you with life beyond your own immediate appetite.
Joy can liberate the heart and gather people together. It can also become excess, performance, distraction, or a refusal to notice the grief already mixed into the celebration.
Receive what is genuinely pleasurable without demanding that it last forever. The wisest joy knows its season and does not become less real because another feeling will eventually follow it.
This figure is one of 81 in Taixuanjing for Today, a book by Joe Perez that renders Yang Xiong’s Canon of Supreme Mystery in original verse, with expanded commentary, essays, and full instructions for casting the oracle yourself.