Yi · Nourishment

The meaning

What the name means Yi is the jaw, and nourishing: what you eat, what you say, what you feed.

The picture Thunder under a mountain, still on top and moving below, like a mouth chewing.

The sense of the whole The whole hexagram is about nourishing yourself and others. Watch what goes in and what comes out: what you eat and what you say both feed your life. Nourish what is right, and do not just take more.

In plain words: what this hexagram says

What you take in and what you say both feed you. Pay attention to what you eat day to day, and to how you speak.

The upper trigram is Mountain and the lower is Thunder: Mountain above, Thunder below. When you read it, first picture the two together as a scene, then set it against the original below. The plain words speak only of stance and do not foretell.

The judgement

貞吉。觀頤，自求口實。

The image

山下有雷，頤；君子以慎言語，節飲食。

The six lines

From the bottom up, the first line is the lowest. When you cast this hexagram and a line is changing, read the matching one. The original is classical Chinese.

1. 初九舍爾靈龜，觀我朵頤，兇。
2. 六二顛頤，拂經，於丘頤，徵兇。
3. 六三拂頤，貞兇，十年勿用，無攸利。
4. 六四顛頤，吉；虎視眈眈，其欲逐逐，無咎。
5. 六五拂經，居貞吉，不可涉大川。
6. 上九由頤，厲吉，利涉大川。

To learn how to read a hexagram, see "How to read a hexagram"; for changing lines, see "Changing lines and the resulting hexagram".