Influence — 咸

What Is Hexagram 31?

Hexagram 31, Xián (咸), Influence, is Lake over Mountain — ䷞ — the opening hexagram of the second half of the I Ching: the youngest son below, the youngest daughter above, and nothing between them but the meeting itself. Its subject is the stirring that passes between two things open to each other, and the discipline of being stirred without being carried off.

The name carries the argument, and the 彖 states the gloss in three characters: 咸，感也 — 咸 means 感, the answering movement of one thing toward another. The received name is written without the heart radical; set 心 under 咸 and the character 感, feeling, comes out. The old commentaries treat that spelling as instruction rather than accident, and the line where the book puts the heart back is the fourth, at the seam between the two trigrams. 王弼 locates 心神, the feeling mind, at the fourth line — the one line in the hexagram that names no part of the body — because the fourth place is where the two halves of the figure first touch: 二體始相交感，以通其志，心神始感者也, the two bodies begin to stir each other and to pass their intentions across, and the mind is what feels first.

The second half of the book is announced here, and it is announced in an unusual way. The rest of the 序卦 proceeds by clauses of the form 故受之以某 — which is why such and such follows. This half opens with a chain instead: 有天地然後有萬物，有萬物然後有男女，有男女然後有夫婦，有夫婦然後有父子，有父子然後有君臣，有君臣然後有上下，有上下然後禮儀有所錯. Heaven and earth, then the ten thousand things; the ten thousand things, then male and female; then husband and wife; then parent and child; then ruler and subject; then high and low, and with high and low the forms of ceremony take their places. Only after that chain does the text give a consequence — 夫婦之道，不可以不久也，故受之以恆, the way of husband and wife cannot be brief, which is why Duration follows. Hexagram 31 is never named in the sequence. It is the endpoint the chain was walking toward: the first figure of the human order in the book's own account of itself.

孔穎達's commentary on the section files two useful things beside that. Against the old division of the book into a heaven half and a human half, he points out that 乾、坤象天地，咸、恆明夫婦 — Heaven and Earth are given one hexagram each, husband and wife share a pair — and he quotes 韓康伯, who refused the split outright: a hexagram is six strokes with the three powers (heaven, earth, human) all present in it, so no half of the book can be reserved for one of them. The 雜卦 gives the pair three characters each: 咸速也，恆久也, influence is quick, duration enduring.

The verdicts are distributed thinly. Among the six lines, good fortune appears exactly twice, and both times with a condition attached: staying put, in the second line, and steadiness, in the fourth. Misfortune appears once, at the calf that cannot help moving, and the remedy sits in that same line. The mild grade 吝, the regret of a small loss, appears once, at the thigh; 悔, the word for remorse, appears only twice and only in negated form, first as 悔亡, regret gone, and then as 无悔, no regret. The first line and the sixth receive no verdict at all, and the character 咎, the book's ordinary word for blame, does not occur anywhere in this hexagram — not in the judgment, not in the lines, and not in the small images. So the grades in this figure are all soft: no blame to be avoided, because 咎 is never named here, no grand verdict handed out, and one flat warning against moving too soon.

Trigram Structure

Lake over Mountain, ䷞, 艮下兌上 in the Chinese order: Mountain below, Lake above. The 大象 reads the pairing as 山上有澤 — a marsh on the summit, held there by the mountain — and the 疏 explains the mechanics without sentiment: 澤性下流，能潤於下；山體上承，能受其潤, the marsh's nature is to run downward and moisten what lies below; the mountain's body, standing under it, takes that moisture in. What the two trigrams do to each other is the hexagram's whole vocabulary, which is why the 疏 can put the pair in one line: 以山感澤，所以為咸, the mountain stirs the marsh, and that is influence.

The 說卦 hands over the two members of the pair separately. Chapter seven gives each trigram a single verb: 艮，止也。兌，說也 — Mountain is stopping, Lake is gladness — and the 彖 builds the judgment out of exactly those two, 止而說, stopping below and gladness above. Chapter three puts the same pair in the older grouping of the eight, 天地定位，山澤通氣，雷風相薄，水火不相射, and chapter six states the result as a rule of the world: mountains and marshes share their breath, and only then 能變化，既成萬物也, can there be transformation and the completion of things. Chapter ten supplies the family: 艮三索而得男，故謂之少男；兌三索而得女，故謂之少女 — at the third exchange Mountain obtains a son and is called the youngest son; Lake obtains a daughter and is called the youngest daughter. That is the physical arrangement the 彖 picks up as 男下女, the young man below, the young woman above, the posture of one who comes asking rather than of one who has been asked.

Chapter eleven lists what each trigram contains, and both lists include an organ. 艮為山、為徑路、為小石、為門闕、為果蓏、為閽寺、為指、為狗、為鼠、為黔喙之屬 — among them 指, the finger, the organ that points and touches. 兌為澤、為少女、為巫、為口舌、為毀折、為附決 — among them 口舌, mouth and tongue, which is the top line's subject exactly. So the figure opens at a fingertip and closes at a tongue, and the catalogue in 說卦 that describes the lower trigram as the pointing part and the upper trigram as the talking part is also a map of how contact degrades when the middle is skipped.

Two structural facts are worth holding next to each other. Turn this figure upside down and it reads as another hexagram rather than a corrupted one: the lines come out 巽下震上, Wind below and Thunder above, which is Hexagram 32, Duration — the next hexagram, the same shape felt from the other end. Reverse every line instead, firm for yielding, and the reading comes out as 兌下艮上, Lake below and Mountain above, which is Hexagram 41, Decrease. So Influence sits between two relatives: the figure it becomes when the view is turned around, and the figure it inverts into when every line is reversed, firm for yielding.

The Judgment

咸：亨。利貞。取女吉。

Xián: hēng. Lì zhēn. Qǔ nǚ jí.

Our rendering: Influence. There is passage, and what serves is to hold to what is correct. Taking a wife is good fortune.

Read character by character:

The judgment is a sequence with one hinge in it. 亨 comes first and without condition: contact of this kind opens something. Then 利貞 is laid across it, and the 疏 draws that clause out of the two trigrams rather than out of a list of virtues: because the mountain below can stop, 能自靜止則不隨動欲, a person who can keep still does not trail after appetite; and because the lake above is gladness, 則不為邪諂, that gladness does not thin into flattery. The last clause, 取女吉, is drawn from the shape of the figure and from the ritual that grew out of it: 艮為少男而居於下，兌為少女而處於上，是男下於女也, the younger man below and the younger woman above, which is why the classic can attach good fortune to a marriage: 婚姻之義，男先求女, the meaning of marriage is that the man asks first, and the old ceremony gave that shape: 男先下於女，然後女應於男, the man goes lower first, and only then does the woman answer. The judgment is naming the order of that exchange, and its grammar is the whole hexagram: the stirring is good fortune only when someone has come down to ask.

What the 彖 does with the rest is widen the same observation until it covers everything: 天地感而萬物化生，聖人感人心而天下和平；觀其所感，而天地萬物之情可見矣. Heaven and earth stir each other and the ten thousand things are born by transformation; the sage stirs human hearts and the world is at peace; watch what anything is stirred by, and the real condition of heaven, earth, and the ten thousand things becomes visible. The 疏 draws the conclusion that keeps the hexagram honest: 感物而動，謂之情也 — being moved by things is what the classic means by feeling. Nothing in this figure is asked to be unmoved. It is asked to be moved in a way that still knows where it is standing.

Jungian reading: the premise of the figure is that feeling is a channel between two parties, not a property of one, and that the channel is bidirectional whether or not the parties intend it. In Jung's terms this is the affective side of relatedness: attention and expectation leak across, and the answer a person receives from another is partly shaped by what they were looking for. The judgment's hinge points at the same difficulty psychology kept rediscovering — contact is not a single event but a relation with conditions — and the fourth line, where the book says the feeling mind first stirs, is the place where those conditions can be examined, because the mind is the only part of this body that can be watched while it is being moved.

The Image

山上有澤，咸；君子以虛受人。

Shān shàng yǒu zé, xián; jūn zǐ yǐ xū shòu rén.

A marsh on the mountain: influence. The noble one therefore receives others by keeping himself hollow.

The instruction is an odd one for a hexagram about attraction, since it names no pursuit at all. The 疏 takes 虛 literally and explains the mechanism: 空虛其懷，不自有實，受納於物，無所棄遺，以此感人，莫不皆應 — emptying the breast, not holding oneself to be full, taking things in without rejecting any of them; stirring others from that condition, he finds that none fails to answer. A vessel already full cannot receive, and a person who arrives at another person carrying a completed position is not there to be answered but to be confirmed. The 大象's rule is the practical form of the judgment's last clause: the marsh is useful to the mountain because it comes down and gives, and the mountain is useful to the marsh because it has room.

Two details of the wording are worth keeping. This Image says 君子, the noble one, where the 彖 speaks of 聖人, and the change of address is deliberate: the cosmic statement belongs to the sage, and the instruction belongs to anyone who can empty a vessel. And the verb 受 is receiving, the ordinary verb for taking in what arrives.

The Lines

初六：咸其拇。 (Xián qí mǔ.) The stirring reaches the big toe.

The bottom line is yielding at the very edge of the figure, and the classic gives it the outermost part of a body to stir in: 拇是足大指也，體之最末, the big toe, the body's far end (one witness prints 母, mother, where the received text has 拇). Contact has happened and intention has formed — 志雖小動，未甚躁求 — but nothing has moved, and the text refuses to grade it: not a good fortune, not a misfortune, not even a mild regret, because blame in this book is born of motion and there has not been any. What the line gives is the small image's diagnosis, 咸其拇，志在外也: the intention is already facing outward, toward the fourth line, and the only event so far is that a person has noticed where they want to go.

六二：咸其腓，凶，居吉。 (Xián qí féi, xiōng, jū jí.) The stirring reaches the calf: misfortune. Staying put: good fortune.

腓 is the calf, and the older gloss quoted in the 疏 says of it 動於腓腸，斯則行矣 — when the stirring reaches the calf, then comes the walk. The 疏 is blunt about what happens when that is the part being stirred: 腓體動躁者也。感物以躁，凶之道也, the calf's body is the restless one, and to be stirred into restlessness is the way to misfortune. The line is the only one in the hexagram that earns the word 凶, and what earns it that word is not an appetite but a step. Set beside it is the remedy, two characters and about nothing but posture: 居吉, staying brings good fortune — 靜居則吉, and the small image grounds it in the line's own yielding nature, 雖凶，居吉，順不害也, though there is misfortune, staying is good fortune; going along with one's own quiet does no harm. The gloss adds a structural reason the position can afford to sit still: 處不乘剛，故可以居而獲吉, the line does not ride on anything firm and so is not pushed. In this figure, the difference between the toe and the calf is not intensity; it is whether you have begun to walk.

九三：咸其股，執其隨，往吝。 (Xián qí gǔ, zhí qí suí, wǎng lìn.) The stirring reaches the thigh; held fast to following, going brings regret.

The thigh is the part of the body that goes where the foot has already decided: 股之為物，隨足者也, 王弼 writes, what the thigh is, is a thing that follows the foot. The position is firm in a firm place, at the top of the mountain trigram, and the same note describes a person who can neither govern the motion nor stay out of it — 進不能制動，退不能靜處 — whose intention is set on following someone else, and the small image adds the verdict on that posture without softening it: 志在隨人，所執下也, when the will is fixed on following, what it holds to is something low. The penalty is the mildest negative grade in the vocabulary, 吝, the regret of a small loss: nothing is ruined, and the position has simply handed its direction to someone else. Among the six, this is the line that shows how easily the pleasure of being moved turns into a habit of being led.

九四：貞吉悔亡，憧憧往來，朋從爾思。 (Zhēn jí huǐ wáng. Chōng chōng wǎng lái, péng cóng ěr sī.) Steadiness: good fortune, and regret is gone. Tossing back and forth — and friends answer what is on your mind.

This is the figure's hinge and its only line that names no body part. It sits at the bottom of the lake trigram and on top of the mountain trigram, and 王弼 calls it the exact seam: 二體始相交感，以通其志，心神始感者也, where the two bodies begin to stir each other and pass intentions across, and the mind is the first thing to feel. Because it is the first thing to feel, it is also the first thing that can be wrong, and the line's order of operations is strict: 必貞然後乃吉，吉然後乃得亡其悔也 — steadiness first, good fortune second, and the clearing of regret only as a consequence. Then the second half of the line describes what happens without that steadiness: 憧憧往來, a mind going back and forth, wanting to move in order to be answered, and 朋從爾思, the friends who answer the thought rather than the person. 王弼's note on why this is a failure is a sentence about attention: 不能無思無欲，故未光大也 — because it cannot get to no-thinking and no-wanting, it does not become large.

The 繫辭 returns to this line at length, in the fourth chapter of its lower part, and it is the deepest comment the classic makes about being stirred. It quotes 憧憧往來，朋從爾思 and answers with a refusal: 天下何思何慮！天下同歸而殊途，一致而百慮 — what is there in the world to think about, what is there to worry over; the world arrives at the same place by different roads, at one destination by a hundred deliberations. Then it states the mechanics of exchange in images that stay concrete: 日往則月來，月往則日來，日月相推而明生焉 — the sun goes and the moon comes, and light is born of the two pushing each other; 寒往則暑來，暑往則寒來，寒暑相推而歲成焉 — and the year is completed the same way. The summary is one clause, 屈信相感而利生焉: the bending and the stretching stir each other, and what is useful comes out of that. Nothing here is a personal achievement; everything here is a relation kept moving. The chapter ends by naming the standard the restless mind cannot reach: 窮神知化，德之盛也, to plumb the numinous and know transformation is where virtue reaches its height. Set the fourth line beside the 繫辭's description of the book itself, in the tenth chapter of its upper part — 易，无思也，无為也，寂然不動，感而遂通天下之故, the classic is without thought and without action, still and unmoving, and by being stirred it reaches through to the affairs of the world — and the line's second clause reads as the precise opposite of the ideal: a mind that keeps checking whether it has been received has stopped being able to receive.

九五：咸其脢，无悔。 (Xián qí méi, wú huǐ.) The stirring reaches the flesh of the back: no regret.

脢 is the flesh of the back, and the witnesses differ on it: 子夏 places it 在脊, on the spine; 馬融 and 說文 read it as the flesh of the back; 鄭玄 as the flesh of the spine; and 王弼 gives it a vertical position instead, 心之上，口之下, above the heart and below the mouth. That last gloss is the useful one, because it explains the verdict. The ruler's seat here has climbed past the heart and not yet reached the mouth: 進不能大感，退亦不為無志 — it cannot stir anything greatly, and it is not without intention either; 其志淺末，故無悔而已, its intention is thin and at the end of things, and so the best available result is the absence of regret. The small image says the same in three characters, 志末也, where 末 is read as 淺, shallow. This is the hexagram's quietest line and its most ordinary position: a middle neither driven nor stubborn, graded with a subtraction rather than a gift. Among the six it is the one that shows the difference between having no complaint and having good fortune.

上六：咸其輔，頰，舌。 (Xián qí fǔ, jiá, shé.) The stirring reaches the jaw, the cheeks, the tongue.

The top of the lake trigram is where this figure ends, and it ends in the organs of speech, listed one after another as if the line were assembling a mouth: 輔、頰、舌者，言語之具, jaw, cheeks, and tongue are the instruments of talking, and 咸道轉末，在於口舌言語而已, the way of influence has turned to its end, and only mouth and tongue are left in it. The small image completes the indictment with 滕口說也 — the character 滕 read as 競與, contending and giving, or in 鄭玄's variant 媵, sending — talk that keeps sending words out with no substance behind them: 所競者口，無復心實, what is contended for is the mouth, and there is no longer anything real in the heart. The 繫辭, in its inventory of how the book handles feeling, files the same insight under a general law: 情偽相感而利害生, the true and the false stir each other, and gain and harm come out of that. The figure that began with a name written without the heart radical finishes at the part of the body where the heart is least required. It is one way to go wrong, complete in six lines: not cruelty, not appetite, but a mouth that has taken over the job of the heart.

How This Hexagram Shows Up in Daily Life

The question this figure asks is narrow and hard to answer: what is coming into you, and what are you really open to. Most accounts of attraction concentrate on output — how to be noticed, how to make an impression, how to get an answer. The Image reverses the direction and gives the work entirely to the receiving end: 虛受人, keep the vessel hollow enough to take the other in. That is a subtraction, and it is why the practical instruction here rarely looks like effort. Time spent clearing an opinion out of the way, listening long enough to be surprised, arriving somewhere without a finished position — these are the hexagram's actions. A person carrying a full load is not available for contact, however agreeable they are.

The six lines read as a map of one thing going wrong and one thing going right. Contact does not fail by being too strong; it fails at the points where motion outruns attention. The toe is intention before any step, and it is ungraded because nothing has happened yet. The calf is the moment a feeling turns into a movement, and it is the only position in the figure that earns misfortune against itself — with the counter-instruction printed next to it, staying still. The thigh is a step further along, where following has become the plan and the direction belongs to somebody else, and the punishment is the small one. Then the fourth place, the middle of the mind, where the difficulty of the figure is compressed into two characters from the heart radical: 憧憧, the back-and-forth. There is a specific modern version of that line, and it is the refresh, the rereading, the mental audit of what someone probably meant. The classic's judgment on the practice is not that it is wicked but that it is small: 未光大也. The line names that cost in its own words: 朋從爾思, the friends who come are the ones your thought was looking for.

The last two positions are the ones to remember, because they are where most people spend most of their lives. The fifth line is the back: nothing dramatic is happening, no great stirring comes or goes, and the result is no regret — a subtraction rather than a prize, and honestly the ordinary grade of a working relationship. The sixth is the mouth: by then the feeling has left the body and become talk about the feeling, which is where a great deal of contact ends, and the figure does not pretend that talk is a lesser form of exchange as such. It says that talk without a heart behind it is the end of the road. Between the back that feels nothing much and the mouth that says everything, the figure keeps pointing at the same gap, which is the place where someone is actually listening.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What does Hexagram 31 mean in one sentence?

That contact is a relation and not a possession: the 彖 glosses the name as 感, stirring, the judgment opens the way with 亨 and then lays 利貞 across it, and the Image gives the whole technique in six characters, 君子以虛受人 — the noble one receives others by keeping himself hollow.

Why is 咸 translated as Influence, and how does it relate to 感?

The 彖 says so itself: 咸，感也. The received name is written without the heart radical, and 感 is that same 咸 with 心 set beneath it, which is why the older readers treat the spelling as part of the lesson. 王弼 puts 心神, the feeling mind, at the fourth line, the only line that names no part of the body and the place where the two halves of the figure first touch. Influence in English carries the older sense the character has — something passing from one thing into another — which is what 感 means before it means emotion.

What is 憧憧往來，朋從爾思 about?

It is the fourth line, the figure's hinge, where 王弼 says the two halves of the hexagram first stir each other and the mind is the first thing to feel: 心神始感者也. The line gives its own order of operations — steadiness, then good fortune, then the clearing of regret — and then describes the alternative, a mind tossing back and forth whose friends answer the thought rather than the person. 王弼's reason is about attention, 不能無思無欲，故未光大也, and the 繫辭 develops the whole passage at length, closing it with 屈信相感而利生焉: the bending and the stretching stir each other, and what is useful comes out of that.

Why does the fifth line get only 无悔, no regret?

Because of where on the body it stands. 脢 is the flesh along the spine behind the heart; 王弼 places it 心之上，口之下, above the heart and below the mouth, and reads the position as one that 進不能大感，退亦不為無志, unable to stir greatly, unwilling to be without intention. The small image calls the intention 末, thin and last. The verdict is a subtraction rather than a gift: nothing to regret and nothing to celebrate, which is the ordinary grade for a middle that stays out of both directions.

The I Ching is a mirror for reflection, not a prediction machine.