Rén-Yin-Yin-Rén
The yin breath stops up the whole house of the world.
The yang has nowhere left, and things are at the end of themselves, in a hurry.
1
He goes all the way down into his own poverty.
The people come to love the middle way.
What was in him was in the middle of him.
2
He is poor and pretends he is not.
The people go off the middle.
The lying is the thing that is prospering.
3
Cornered, he thinks it through.
He gets out.
The teacher he needed was inside him.
4
The soil has gone sour.
The tree comes up knotted and lopsided.
It is the ground that is ill, not the tree.
5
Soup with no grain in it.
His belly is hollow and sounds hollow.
Nothing about him has come out of shape.
6
Nothing with horns left on the hill.
Nothing with scales left in the water.
When the people run out he is the next thing eaten.
7
He walks straight and still ends in the gaol.
Three years, and they let him out.
The steep place came level under him.
8
He wades out into the frost and the snow.
His neck is tied down to his knees.
There is not enough of him left to live on.
9
The jade disc broken, the tablet in pieces.
Frogs breeding in the cold stove.
None of it was anything he did.
THE IMAGE
A rugged box canyon where the mountain trail terminates at a sheer granite cliff, but an ancient pine finds root in a tiny fissure, pointing toward a hidden ascending staircase carved into the rock.
THE COMMENTARY
The situation has reached the limits of available strength, resources, or possibility. Something may feel cornered, depleted, impoverished, or unable to continue in its present form.
Exhaustion strips away alternatives and therefore exposes what remains essential. When outward resources disappear, character, inward clarity, and the ability to accept reality become more visible. Sometimes the way out appears only after every easier route has closed.
Do not demand ordinary productivity from an exhausted situation. Preserve what can still live, identify the true source of depletion, and distinguish what you caused from what simply happened around you. An ending of resources is not always an ending of meaning.
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.