Yang-Rén-Rén-Rén
The yang breath urges greatly and makes each office plain.
Things stretch and stretch, each spending its own strength.
1
He does the work that is not work.
Nothing at all is left undone.
The road did the walking.
2
The matter is standing at the hinge.
He asks nobody, he consults nobody.
The token he was keeping is gone.
3
The hour goes past, the hour comes back.
The space between will not take a hair.
He did not miss which way it was going.
4
The man takes up the woman’s work.
He does not take up the nursing with it.
The work is not the one that was his.
5
He does the work that is actually his.
The king sends food to him for it.
The office was the thing that was trusted.
6
He takes the whole weight on himself.
What is coming is not going to be stopped.
How was he ever to bear it?
7
The old man holds up the orphan.
The boy brings the water jar across.
The small one has learned which way things go.
8
The woman takes up the man’s work.
Ten years, and nobody corrects it.
The house does not come through.
9
It goes in against the ear and out along the foot.
Upright.
What galls in the hearing runs smooth in the doing.
THE IMAGE
Master builders, masons, and architects raising the timber pillars and stone foundations of an imperial granary and pavilion terrace beneath clear blue skies, with structural blueprints unrolled on a wooden drafting table.
THE COMMENTARY
The matter before you requires action, responsibility, or attention to what actually needs doing. This is less about ambition than about finding the work that belongs to your place in the situation.
Affairs warns against both interference and overburdening. You can take on someone else’s role, neglect your own, or assume that responsibility means carrying every part yourself. The strongest action comes when duty, capacity, timing, and position correspond.
Do what is truly yours, and let the structure of the situation tell you where your authority begins and ends. Some matters resolve through surprisingly little force once each person or part takes up the work appropriate to 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.