Yin-Yang-Yang-Yang
The yang breath has taken flight.
It shifts its force and changes its shape, and things alter what is quick in them.
1
He is changed in the dark, and not for the better.
It sets like a nature in him.
The turning happened while he was young.
2
Now seven, now nine.
The wheel keeps turning under the road.
Nothing in it is ever out of time.
3
He takes something white down into the mud.
It comes up black.
This is a change and it is not a light.
4
The change gains a little.
Nothing in it goes wrong.
This was the small thing people were hoping for.
5
An ox with its horns off, a horse with horns on.
Not of now and not of before.
Something standing outside the constancy of heaven.
6
Going into the water he takes the boat.
Coming out of the water he takes the cart.
The road is what has changed, not him.
7
What should have changed did not change.
It turns into an illness.
Nothing in him could keep itself good.
8
The four horses are going badly.
They change the man holding the reins.
A different pair of hands and the road opens.
9
He does not carry his virtue to the end.
In three years someone else has the place.
Nothing built that way stands for long.
THE IMAGE
A snake shedding its dry winter skin on a mossy sunlit boulder while a phoenix-like firebird takes wing into a luminous sunrise above mountains shedding winter snow into vibrant green ravines.
THE COMMENTARY
The situation is changing shape, whether or not you have chosen the timing. Something familiar may no longer function as it did, and the wise response is to distinguish necessary adaptation from change pursued merely for its own sake.
Some changes are timely and almost effortless because the road itself has altered. Others distort what was sound, replace one confusion with another, or leave a person unrecognizable to themselves. Change is not automatically renewal.
Ask what truly needs to change and what should remain constant while conditions shift around it. The most successful transformation may preserve the essential traveller while changing the vehicle, method, role, or route.
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.