䷲ Zhen 震 Hexagram - Thunder

Awakening

JianLei Zhen JunZi Yi KongJuXiuXing

洊雷 震 君子以恐懼脩省

Continue thundering, this is the natural phenomenon of the Zhen hexagram. Learn from this – be cautious and look after yourself with diligence.

Exciting! We are now starting our work with the Fourth Hexagram Palace, Zhen! As with the other JingGua 經卦, the eight original hexagrams of BaGong 八宮 /Eight Palaces, the structure of the Zhen hexagram is different from the structure of most of the hexagrams I have written about thus far. If you would like to review the details on JingGua 經卦, please refer to my article on the Qian hexagram.

The Zhen hexagram DaXiang sentence starts with JianLei 洊雷, which I translated as “continue thundering” above. The original meaning of Jian means water keeps flowing and Lei means thunder. Together, JianLei means thunder keeps going like flowing water. In Daoist tradition, we typically include lightning when we speak of thunder. It is not surprising to me that this Zhen DaXiang sentence used the image of flowing water to describe thunder because a pattern of lightning is often similar to a pattern of a flowing river.