Rén-Rén-Yin-Yin
The yin breath goes along with everything.
It is a mixed dark with no edge to it, and nobody sees where it is rooted.
1
Yellow, and quick, and hidden, and straight.
It goes along.
Four things, and they turn out to be one thing.
2
She carries the richness in her.
The work of it is a woman’s work.
She will not be still, and it goes.
3
The female is straight and steadily kind.
She guards the root.
She has not forgotten what she came out of.
4
He goes about advertising his own labour.
It is not the same as what stands at five.
He is chopping down his own good name.
5
A spirit-sack, and it holds everything.
What it does is precious and it is yellow.
It does not dare to be full of itself.
6
The sack loses its tie.
The good vessels spill out of it.
A minister’s mouth came open.
7
Square and hard, he goes against the going-along.
It is useful, and it is a minister’s straightness.
He complies by refusing.
8
He goes along with what is not straight.
He does not keep his life.
There was nothing at the middle of him to gather it.
9
He goes along with what is right and forgets he is alive.
What he leans on is heaven’s straightness.
The mandate came to him because he did not ask.
THE IMAGE
A serene sage in flowing scholar robes gently leading a magnificent white ox adorned with silk ribbons along a winding mountain path beside a crystalline river framed by weeping willow trees.
THE COMMENTARY
The situation asks how to go along without losing yourself. Cooperation, receptivity, service, adaptation, and obedience may all be involved, but genuine compliance is not the same as passivity.
Sometimes the right response is to follow the greater pattern, carry what has been entrusted to you, and refrain from making yourself the center. At other times, fidelity requires refusing a command or direction that has become crooked.
The oracle asks what you are complying with. Go along with what is right, adapt where adaptation serves the whole, and resist when agreement would betray the very principle that gives cooperation its value.
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.