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A hexagram in the I Ching is composed of four structural parts:
The Summation, whose composition is attributed to King Wen, consists of the title of the hexagram and an admonition. Because of their unnecessary and uninformative nature, I question their ascription to King Wen, who was probably satisfied by his completion of The Great Chou Mandala.
The Component Trigrams are the upper three and the lower three lines considered as trigrams. The component trigrams repeat the meaning of the hexagram, but in general terms (hexagrams are read from bottom upward):
28 Beam gg gg ggggg Weak ggggg ggggg ggggg Care gg gg
Care of the Weak: the sense of the hexagram is "Care of the Aged" in the family.
31 Couple Embracing gg gg ggggg Affection ggggg ggggg gg gg Lasting gg gg
Lasting Affection: this is the ideal in the husband-wife relationship.
41 Cavity ggggg gg gg The Hard, that is, the Shell gg gg gg gg ggggg Softening ggggg
Softening of the Shell: the hexagram refers to the drilling of a cavity in the Plastron.
47 Victim gg gg ggggg Yielding ggggg gg gg ggggg Blood gg gg
Blood Yielding: the fate of the Victim.
48 Victim Inverted gg gg ggggg Blood (in this case) gg gg ggggg ggggg Dispersing gg gg
Dispersing Blood: the Victim is being bled.
However, the meanings of the trigrams are so general that it is impossible to assign any meaning to a hexagram by them alone.
As can be seen by reading the same numbered line in multiple hexagrams,
| Line | Quality | Correspondence |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | Moon | Constriction |
| 5 | Mercury | Expansion |
| 4 | Venus | Relaxation |
| 3 | Mars | Tension |
| 2 | Jupiter | Action |
| 1 | Saturn | Quiescence |
Every Phase of existence may be analyzed by these six stages.
The text appended to each line is an outcome of the meaning of the hexagram and the above system of line qualities. It is therefore possible to deduce the general meaning of a line in spite of the extensive corruption of the text.
Because knowledge of the image and symbol basis for the meaning of each hexagram has long been lost and because the corrupt text is taken as sacrosanct, various very flexible, mechanical systems have been contrived for explaining the meaning of appended text. Among them are Line Position Analysis (see Legge, p.16) and Nuclear Trigrams. Legge, unfortunately, used Line Position Analysis in his commentary on each hexagram. An extensive elaboration of nuclear trigrams is give in Ponce.
