Rén-Yin-Rén-Rén
The yin’s shape thickens and covers everything.
The yang has lost the thread of its work, and things compete at being hard.
1
A boulder for an inside.
Nothing gets into it, and it calls that being straight.
There is no changing it.
2
Hard and white, and shaped like jade.
Inside, it goes on changing.
Being altered is a thing it can do.
3
It is the month for ice and there is no ice.
Something warm is leaking out of the middle of it.
It cannot hold to one thing long enough to freeze.
4
The small bee goes about it and about it.
It makes the stalk before it makes the comb.
The house is not the thing that has to be big.
5
The comb is huge and the stalk is thin.
Empty.
Everything is on the outside of it.
6
One slender stalk, fine as thread.
The nine provinces hang from it.
The people underneath sleep well.
7
He puts his hard head down and butts the burial mound.
The mound does not move.
He has no idea which way he is going.
8
He trusts his hardness and it takes him into trouble.
What is left is the beast that gores the guilty.
It only ever went straight.
9
The bee sets fire to its own comb.
What it was standing on is gone.
It burned the thing it was living in.
THE IMAGE
An ancient iron pagoda and solid jade stele standing completely unbroken on a windswept cliff against howling late-autumn gales, encircled by gnarled stone pines.
THE COMMENTARY
Something is becoming rigid. Firmness may be necessary, but the oracle asks whether strength has hardened into an inability to receive, adapt, or change.
True hardness is not brittle. A sound structure can remain strong while allowing inward transformation, whereas sheer rigidity often conceals weakness by refusing every influence that might expose it.
Use firmness where the situation needs support, continuity, or resistance. But beware of becoming so hard that you destroy your own dwelling, exhaust yourself against immovable obstacles, or mistake inflexibility for principle.
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.