Rén-Yang-Yang-Yin
The yin will not transform them, the yang will not pour out.
Every one of the ten thousand things shuts its mouth.
1
He shuts his mouth and gives nothing.
A grown man sitting where the women sit.
Everyone walks around him on the way out.
2
He keeps it back in the blood and feeds the dry bone.
The thin man is fattening himself.
What he stored, he stored inward.
3
His face does not meet anyone’s.
His mouth makes a noise with no words in it.
There is very little human left in the room.
4
He keeps the grain shut in.
No relief given, nothing shared out.
It settles on the old people and then on the whole family.
5
He is not on center and not on line.
The grain rots and the worms get it, and still he holds on.
He is hoarding something that is eating itself.
6
The spring at the source runs wide.
He holds it up on the high ground.
Nobody should laugh at water kept for later.
7
He keeps it back inside the body.
The flesh at the center goes.
Bone and flesh are hurt by the same holding.
8
His holding-back runs into reckoning.
He gives up an ox to pray with.
The size of the expense was the size of the trouble.
9
Everything shut and no rain comes.
What is left is dried meat.
There is nothing in that sky to watch for.
THE COMMENTARY
Something is being kept back. Words, resources, affection, information, nourishment, or action may be withheld, and the oracle asks whether restraint is protecting something valuable or causing life to dry up.
There are good reasons not to pour everything out immediately. Reserves can preserve a future, silence can prevent harm, and containment can give strength time to gather. But withholding becomes destructive when fear, greed, resentment, or rigidity prevents necessary circulation.
Examine what is being stored and why. What remains closed too long may rot inside its container, while what is carefully conserved can sustain many when the right time arrives.
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.