O.K., we're at the 10th hexagram in the I Ching, and we're (hopefully) pretty clear on how these things work. They've stopped being all Chinese and started being, well, decipherable. To recap, you've got six lines, with two different ways to look at them: as a set of two trigrams (which are explained in the Judgement and the Image verses) or as individual lines representing relationships between yin and yang (as explained in the, uh, Lines verses).

So, this hexagram, we're told in the Judgement, represents a person successfully treading on a tiger's tail -- that is, doing something very risky, doing it very well, and reaping the rewards. The top trigram is qian, showing the rising force of heaven, and the bottom is dui, the joyous, peaceful waters of the lake. To make sense of the hexagram, you have to know that the lake waters are also rising, only with less effort than the force of heaven. The sky's already up there; it doesn't have to work so hard. Normally, a rising trigram in the bottom position would indicate conflict, but because it's weaker than the top one, the power relations are all good. The greater force is watching over the smaller one as it follows the same direction.

It's also important here that the eight trigrams can stand in for members of a family: qian is the father, and happy little tui is the youngest daughter.

The lesson in the Image verse runs counter to the modern West's ideas of egalitarianism:

Thus the superior man discriminates between high and low,
And thereby fortifies the thinking of the people.

In other words,

Among mankind also there are necessarily differences of elevation; it is impossible to bring about universal equality. But it is important that differences in social rank should not be arbitrary and unjust, for if this occurs, envy and class struggle are the inevitable consequences.

This is a very Confucian lesson about social standing, and how joy follows when one's inner worth is matched with external success. Or, you know, worthlessness with failure. Cuts both ways.

The lines, as you might expect, tell the story of someone advancing through a dangerous situation -- how different approaches to walking on a tiger's tail will get different results. The emphasis is on caution and knowledge, here, rather than advancing blindly or taking half-steps.

It's also quoted in The 36 Strategies, a book of advice on dealing with any and all conflicts. The chapter referring to this hexagram, lu, is about using subterfuge to defeat the superior opponent. Actually, it tells the story of a kind of funny practical joke this one dude played on this other dude he was hired to kill. Not so funny for the victim, but still. The lesser man tread carefully on that tiger's tail and won the day.







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_{I'm using the Wilhelm/Baynes translation from the comprehensive Wengu collection or the user-friendly Eclectic Energies site. Feel like going deeper? Check out Hong Kong's Taoist Culture & Information Centre's I Ching page, and the essays & reviews on Ma Xia's Yijing Page}