Hexagram 27 providing nourishment

Hexagram 27, I (頤), "The Corners of the Mouth," is the Yijing's most sustained meditation on the question of what feeds what. Its image is an open mouth: the upper trigram Kên (mountain, stillness) forms the immobile upper jaw; the lower trigram Chên (thunder, movement) forms the moving lower jaw. From this anatomical figure the hexagram derives its double meaning — the physical act of taking in food, and the social and spiritual question of what one chooses to nourish.

The judgment is spare and demanding:

Perseverance brings good fortune. Pay heed to the providing of nourishment and to what a man seeks to fill his own mouth with.

Wilhelm's commentary makes the ethical weight explicit: "everything depends on its being in harmony with what is right." The hexagram does not simply celebrate nourishment — it interrogates it. The lower trigram seeks nourishment for itself; the upper affords nourishment for others. The two movements are structurally opposed, and the question the hexagram poses is which direction one is actually moving in at this moment.

The line statements sharpen this into something almost merciless. The nine at the beginning — a strong yang line that could, like the "magic tortoise," nourish itself on air — instead looks enviously toward the ruling line at the top, wanting to be fed with the rest. Wilhelm calls this "contemptible and disastrous." The six in the second place turns away from its natural peer and seeks nourishment from the summit, which also brings misfortune. The pattern is consistent: seeking nourishment from the wrong source, or seeking it at all when one has the capacity to provide it, is the hexagram's central failure mode.

This is not merely a social teaching about generosity. The Image — "at the foot of the mountain, thunder" — instructs the superior person to be "careful of his words and temperate in eating and drinking." Speech and ingestion are the two movements of the mouth, and both require the same discipline: what goes out and what comes in must be governed by what is right, not by appetite or envy.

Jung, consulting the Yijing about his introduction of the book to Western readers, received hexagram 50 — the Cauldron — and noted that the Yijing described itself as "a ritual vessel containing cooked food," where "the food is to be understood as spiritual nourishment" (Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958). The pairing is instructive: hexagram 27 and hexagram 50 are the Yijing's two great nourishment hexagrams, and Wilhelm distinguishes them precisely — 27 is nourishment as a social and ethical problem, 50 is nourishment as transformation. The Cauldron cooks; the Corners of the Mouth ask who is being fed and with what.

Depth psychology has its own version of this question. Edinger notes that food imagery in dreams signals readiness for coagulatio — the alchemical fixing of psychic content into lived, embodied reality: "to eat something means to incorporate it — literally, to turn it into body. Hence, dreams in which the dreamer is offered something to eat indicate that an unconscious content is ready for assimilation by the ego" (Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche, 1985). Hillman pushes further, arguing that what we eat in dreams "is not food but images" — that eating in the underworld nourishes the soul's persons, and that food is "precisely the image of nourishment," a sacrificial, ceremonial act of keeping the gods alive (The Dream and the Underworld, 1979).

Hexagram 27 holds all of this in a single figure. The open mouth is the site where the outer world becomes inner substance — where what one chooses to take in, and what one chooses to offer out, constitutes character. The hexagram's warning is not against hunger but against misdirected hunger: the strong line that abandons its own capacity for self-nourishment and looks enviously at the summit; the soul that seeks the wrong food from the wrong source and calls it sustenance.

The ruling lines — the six in the fifth place and the nine at the top — are those who "provide nourishment for men of worth and thus reach the whole people." The hexagram's highest expression is not self-sufficiency but the capacity to nourish what is genuinely worth nourishing, which requires first having been honest about what one is actually feeding.

  • hexagram — the six-line figure as the primary symbolic unit of the Yijing
  • coagulatio — the alchemical operation of fixing spirit into body, and its role in dream interpretation
  • James Hillman — portrait and bibliography of the archetypal psychologist
  • Edward Edinger — portrait of the Jungian analyst who mapped alchemical symbolism onto the individuation process

Sources Cited

  • Wilhelm, Richard, 1950, The I Ching or Book of Changes
  • Jung, Carl Gustav, 1958, Psychology and Religion: West and East
  • Edinger, Edward F., 1985, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy
  • Hillman, James, 1979, The Dream and the Underworld