Yang-Yang-Yang-Rén
The yang breath stirs faintly, and stirring, is mired.
Things are born, and birth is hard.
1
Yellow, unmixed, submerged,
its boundaries nowhere visible,
stored up and pressing in the spring.
2
The yellow is no longer pure.
It doubles back into the root.
What bends there does not measure the middle.
3
The infant crawls and crawls.
Begun rightly, it will arrive.
Two faces are watching it move.
4
Hauling at what is not mine by virtue,
hauling with force instead.
The arms are not equal to the load.
5
Hauling a cart out of a mountain ravine —
fit work for a great person.
The weight is the measure of the office.
6
He drives his cart onward
and into an empty hill.
He kept the wheels and lost the road.
7
Out of the gorge and up the slope,
and something may pull the ox for you.
No one comes to take your place.
8
The cart will not come free.
The shinbone snaps, the axle snaps.
The thief was inside the harness.
9
High mountain heaped on high mountain,
and below it the river running.
Whoever has an oar may cross.
THE IMAGE
A heavy ox cart laboring through rocky gorges and deep waters, yellow springs welling from beneath jagged boulders.
THE COMMENTARY
Something is trying to be born, but the conditions are difficult. Progress may be slow, awkward, uncertain, or far more laborious than you expected. This does not necessarily mean the undertaking is wrong; beginnings often reveal their strength by the resistance they must work through.
Do not confuse difficulty with failure. What matters now is whether there is a real direction beneath the struggle. If there is, patience, assistance, and steady effort can gradually bring the situation out of the ravine.
Mired also warns against hauling more than belongs to you. Some burdens prove capacity; others only exhaust it. The task is to distinguish the weight that belongs to your office, relationship, or path from the weight you have taken on through pride, fear, or misplaced responsibility.
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.