Hexagram 2 the receptive k'un
K'un is the second hexagram of the Yijing and the structural complement to Qian, the Creative. Where Qian is composed of six unbroken yang lines, K'un consists of six broken yin lines — pure receptivity made visible in form. The Wilhelm-Baynes translation renders its judgment with characteristic economy:
The Receptive brings about sublime success, furthering through the perseverance of a mare. If the superior man undertakes something and tries to lead, he goes astray; but if he follows, he finds guidance.
The image is precise: not the dragon of heaven, but the mare of earth — an animal that combines strength and swiftness with gentleness and devotion. The horse belongs to earth as the dragon belongs to heaven, and the mare's tireless movement across open plains figures the vast, sustaining expanse of K'un's domain. Crucially, the text does not counsel passivity but a specific kind of active responsiveness: the mare does not stand still, she moves — but she follows the herd's direction rather than setting it.
Huang's translation renders K'un as "Responding" rather than "The Receptive," and the choice illuminates something the English word "receptive" can obscure. The Chinese ideograph combines tu (earth) with a vertical stroke suggesting extension — the extension of submission, of responsive yielding that is itself a form of power. Huang (1998) notes that K'un "cannot accomplish anything alone" but requires "acceptance of the purest yang energy from Qian and action in accordance with perfect timing" — after which it produces the myriad beings. This is not weakness; it is the condition of actualization itself.
The Wilhelm-Baynes commentary on the Decision makes the cosmological claim explicit:
The Receptive is that which brings to birth, that which takes the seed of the heavenly into itself and gives to beings their bodily form. The Receptive in its riches carries all things. Its nature is in harmony with the boundless. It embraces everything in its breadth and illumines everything in its greatness.
The relationship between Qian and K'un is not dualism but complementarity with a defined orientation. Wilhelm is explicit that K'un is "the complement, not the opposite" of the Creative — it does not combat Qian but completes it. The moment K'un attempts to lead rather than follow, to stand as equal rather than responsive, it becomes destructive to both principles. This is not a statement about women or subordinates in any simple social sense; it is a cosmological claim about the conditions under which yin energy is generative rather than chaotic.
Hellmut Wilhelm (1960) traces the animal symbolism through its historical layers: originally the mare, later the cow, with the dragon-mare antithesis possibly reflecting the overlaying of a northern horse culture upon an earlier cattle culture. What persists across these shifts is K'un's association with "peaceful labor" — "God causes things to serve one another in the sign of the Receptive" — in contrast to Qian's northwest, where "the dark and the light arouse each other" in decisive battle.
The six individual lines trace a complete arc. The first line warns that hoarfrost underfoot means solid ice is not far off — small beginnings of darkness must be heeded. The second line, the hexagram's ruling line, gives K'un's essential character: "Straight, square, great. Without purpose, yet nothing remains unfurthered." Earnest fulfillment of duty, never in doubt about what to do, spontaneously furthering all creatures without intention. The fifth line, "a yellow lower garment brings supreme good fortune," names the perfection of inner beauty that expresses itself through works without display. The final line is the warning: when yin refuses its proper position and attempts to equal yang, dragons fight in the meadow and both suffer harm. The dark principle cannot sustain itself as the ruling one.
Neumann's reading of the Great Mother archetype runs beneath all of this. The vessel, the womb, the earth that carries and contains — these are not merely metaphors but the symbolic grammar through which the elementary feminine character has been experienced across cultures. K'un is the hexagrammatic crystallization of that grammar: the body-vessel that shelters the unborn, nourishes the born, and receives the dead, all without display of the completed work.
- Kun — the Receptive — the cosmological and structural role of K'un in the Yijing system
- Trigram — the eight three-line figures from which all sixty-four hexagrams are composed
- Moving Lines — how lines at the extremity of their principle generate transformation between hexagrams
- Erich Neumann — portrait of the depth psychologist whose work on the Great Mother illuminates K'un's archetypal ground
Sources Cited
- Wilhelm, Richard, and Cary F. Baynes, 1950, The I Ching or Book of Changes
- Wilhelm, Hellmut, 1960, Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching
- Huang, Alfred, 1998, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation
- Neumann, Erich, 1955, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype