yin · rén — tetragrams 46–54 — 12 July to 22 August
The tide has turned. What holds now is form.
Yin in the region, man in the province. This is the province of made things — pattern, rite, measure, constancy — and they are made precisely because the natural support is going. The yin hides things away and folds them shut while the yang goes on flinging the walls out wider; between those two motions, everything human gets built.
The season is high summer into the beginning of autumn, which falls at Constancy. Pattern and substance stand side by side and things are brilliant. Upper and lower take their own bodies and rites appear between them. Then the yin comes out strong and plain, the yang slips away in secret, and things are about to be lost; the yin comes on more and the yang goes more, and things are swept wide and empty. Against that, the last four figures are a kind of holding: minister and lord each knowing which they are, so that nothing changes in ten thousand ages; the restless and the yielding each keeping to their own measure; the one taking by arms and the other giving by pattern, so that between them a way can last. The province ends with the yin about to scatter them and the yang still holding them together.
In this province the Mystery answers questions about conduct rather than outcome, and the answer is nearly always the same: the form is what survives. When the underlying support goes — and here it is going — a marriage, a practice, an office, a friendship is carried by what was agreed rather than by what is felt. That is not coldness. It is the only thing that reaches the far side. One appraisal of Rites is missing from the transmitted text and has been left open on the page. If your reading falls there, take the silence as the reading: some obligations have no wording, and you already know which of yours is the one nobody ever said out loud.