Hexagram ䷘ WúWàng 无妄/Nihility
—Hopelessness or A New Dawn?
TiānXiàLéiXíng WùYǔ Wú Wàng XiānWángYǐ MàoDuì ShíYùWànWù
天下雷行 物與 无妄 先王以茂對 時育萬物
Thunder roars across the land and the nature is giving birth to all things, which are the phenomena representing Hexagram ䷘ WúWàng 无妄 / Nihility. Learning from this, the former king treated others with abundance, and in time all things were nurtured.
— DaXiang 大象
Figure 1. An image representing Hexagram ䷘ WúWàng 无妄 / Nihility. In this SānJiǔ 三九 (coldest winter) period, I took this picture knowing it was perfect for this article. Read more to find out why.
By now you are very familiar with the structure of all hexagram DaXiang sentences, which typically start with the natural image of the hexagram, immediately followed by the name of the hexagram. Hoever, this is the only hexagram among all sixty-four that does not have the same exact structure. Let’s look into this more closely.
The first word Tiān, heaven, world, universe, or the way of the universe and is the symbolic meaning of the top trigram ☰ Qian 乾. The second word, Xià 下, means under, below, or a lower position, which points out the relation with the bottom trigram. Put together, these two words, TiānXià, commonly mean the world. The third word, Léi 雷 (thunder) is the symbolic name of bottom trigram Zhèn 震 ☳. The fourth word, Xíng, means move, act, action, executive, phase, and element. Xíng here indicates that it is actively thundering, which is the action of the bottom trigram, and it also represents nature generating new life energy.
Together, the first four characters TiānXiàLéiXíng 天下雷行, describe natural phenomena associated with hexagram ䷘ WúWàng — thunder is roaring throughout the whole world!
You now know from our experience with the previous hexagrams, the next word is usually the name of the hexagram. However, in this case, this sentence was not written in the same way. Instead, there were two other words, WùYǔ 物與, which appear before the name. Wù means object, affair, thing, substance, creature, or all living beings. In oracle bone style written, Wù looks like a combination of two symbols—Dòu 斗 and Niú 牛, which are the first and second Lunar Mansions of Northern Mystical Warrior.
