_{Curious why this is in a blog about Chinese adoption? Read this explanation.}

OK, back to my notes on the Big Text of Chinese Culture, gleaning advice from one of the world's best sources of wisdom.

With da zhuang, we've gone from the last chapter's Retreat to a position of power. Obviously, we weren't running away, but repositioning ourselves to make an even greater advance. The lesson of this hexagram seems to be: Time to stop fleeing!

What's the character mean?
The character for da zhuang shows a big person standing up (the da part, meaning "great" or "big") and a bamboo weapon to the left of a strong person standing with arms outstretched - an ideogram for shi which can mean an intellectual, but used to mean a feudal retainer or stout, sturdy guard. Thus, the two things together mean "strength": a bouncer with a club.

What's on the top?
The outer trigram is zhen, the swirling, moving quality of thunder.

What's on the bottom?
The inner trigram is qian, the expansive force of heaven.

What's in the guts?
The nuclear trigrams are happy little dui, the swamp, over qian, heaven. This seems like a slightly unnatural state of affairs (swamps are low ground, not high), but not necessarily an unpleasant one.

What's it from far away?
The Judgement and Image verses (or at least Wilhelm's commentaries) seem to follow that hint in the nuclear trigrams, talking about how it's useful to persevere, but that there's a danger of being overconfident in your own strength. Even though you are mighty enough to turn and overcome the challenges that have chased you hither and yon, it's worth it to ask wiser, stronger folks for help and advice... and not to get so giddy that one grows too big for one's britches.

What's it saying up close?
The Lines verses, humorously enough, depict a goat having some trouble with a hedge. Now, it seems to me that the goat is a lot stronger than the hedge - for one thing, it could walk around it (which is more than the hedge can do), and for another, the goat could just sit and eat it.
But that's not what happens.
We start with a warning that power in a low place seeks to rise above its station - like toes that are too strong and wind up tripping your feet. Then, we get the goat trouble. Bragging about power is like a goat butting a hedge. Its horns get all tangled up. If it slowly keeps going forward, it'll get through the hedge. At that point, it stops acting like a goat and can just sort of hang out being all cool and stuff. But if it keeps on being goatlike - the final line depicts the goat butting another hedge - then it's just stuck.

Strength on its own can only get you so far. It's the quiet dedication to progress that makes strength worth anything.



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_{I'm using the Wilhelm/Baynes translation from the comprehensive Wengu collection or the user-friendly Eclectic Energies site, and I'm taking the character translations from Alfred Huang's The Complete I Ching. 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.}