Yin-Yin-Yang-Yin
The yang breath is high and full and stops up every space.
Things are packed out to the very edge of what they wanted.
1
Full, and nothing measuring it.
The hidden power goes.
There was nothing in him holding him back.
2
He does it and does not lean on having done it.
Because he does not hold it, he has it all.
This is what the dark power is called.
3
Profit packed up to his collarbone.
None of it does the common good any good.
Everything went in at his own gate.
4
A little abundance, and he carries himself like a servant.
This is the gate great men come out of.
Everyone who got through it went in low.
5
He carries the good fortune shoulder-high.
Behind him something is dragging and will not come loose.
Both hands are full.
6
Heaven hands him the light and opens it wide.
The blessing is in the standing-lower.
The most a man can hold is what he does not grasp.
7
He rides on the fire.
The cold spring is coming.
Nothing at that heat gets to finish.
8
He ladles some out of the brimming thing.
The tipping-over comes very close.
He got under it by taking away.
9
Full all the way, and nothing to be done.
The disaster comes down out of the sky.
The road heaven walks turns round at the top.
THE IMAGE
An imperial summer solstice festival banquet laid out on jade tables with steaming bronze ding cauldrons, ripe summer melons, and brimming jars of sweet ceremonial wine beneath festive crimson pavilions.
THE COMMENTARY
The situation is full. Resources, success, attention, power, opportunity, emotion, or responsibility may have reached a level where the primary problem is no longer how to obtain more, but how to carry what has already arrived.
Abundance contains the beginning of its own reversal. Fullness leaves little room for addition, and what reaches an extreme must eventually change direction. This is not a reason to distrust prosperity, but it is a reason to meet it with proportion.
Receive what is present without making possession your identity. Give some away, remain lower than what you hold, and leave space inside the fullness. The safest abundance is the kind that circulates rather than piling itself ever higher.
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.