Yin-Rén-Yang-Yang
The yin hides things away and folds them shut.
The yang goes on flinging the walls out wider.
1
He widens it and widens it.
He never straightens the base.
Anything that moves now tips.
2
Metal for the frame-posts, jade for the uprights.
He widens the city with them.
The wall is only as good as what holds the boards.
3
He widens and there is no son.
He went looking for a wife and found a stone one.
Nothing is coming after this.
4
He widens his own gate and door.
He uses it to keep out raiders.
The building was the defending.
5
The gate of heaven thrown wide, the hall’s steps opened out.
Something is going to go wrong in it.
The room is bigger than the man in it.
6
Great and high, and the hundred lords crowding in.
Out of this the power rises.
This is what the great peace looks like from inside.
7
Huge on the outside and lost in the middle.
The good men are out in the fields, the small men in the house.
Nobody is home.
8
Wide on the outside, hollow within.
Good for a drum, good for a gong.
A thing has to be empty before it can be heard.
9
He widens to the top of the wall.
Three years and no one comes when he calls.
He built too high to bend down from.
THE IMAGE
Masons, builders, and surveyors demolishing old, narrow adobe village walls to construct a magnificent, expansive outer stone rampart enclosing fertile orchards and new commercial districts under the wide summer sky.
THE COMMENTARY
The boundaries are expanding. You may be making more room, enlarging a project, widening your influence, opening a relationship, or moving beyond limits that once seemed necessary.
Widening creates possibility, but space alone is not substance. Expansion built on a poor foundation produces instability, and a larger room can expose rather than solve the weakness of whoever occupies it.
Ask what the new space is for. Expansion is useful when the supporting structure grows with it and when good people, ideas, or resources can actually inhabit the larger field. Do not build so wide or so high that connection becomes impossible.
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.