Xiăo Chù, hexagram 09

Tending small livestock

  Wind over Heaven, spreading the seeds.
A shepherd keeps his sheep calm through the calmness of his own mind. He lets his sheep find their own preferred kinds of shrubs and grasses, and just sees to it, every moment, that all are safe.
  Hex.9 is the opposite of hex.16, with its big images and motivation. Xiao Chu is the small harvest, the profit which comes from steady work, from seeds growing into plants. Being content with the small gains achieved.
  When one accepts the slow way in which nature works, one creates the space, where one's true path can unfold.

Hex.09

XIAO³: The character above (1): 3 grains of rice or sand - small.
The character below, CHU⁴ or XÜ⁴ is composed of silk SI¹ (2) and field with plants TIAN² (3). According to Wang Hongyuan: not silk but bolas, an ancient throwing weapon (2), with the symbol for hunting (3). According to others, it is not SI¹ but XUAN², profound or dark, dark-colored, black. Later use: mystic, mysterious.
Li Leyi p.389 says: silk (2) and field (3): the harvest of silk and crops.
CHÙ: animal, livestock. On oracle bones: raise livestock.
Pronounced as XÜ⁴: rear or raise (livestock or children), nourish, support, cherish, suffocate, suppress, accumulate, store, gather, keep, meadow, put out to pasture in nature, conform with, follow, tolerate, support, docile. Dà chù: big cattle. Xù is exchangeable with the same character with 'plants' added: collect, store, save up, hoard, reserve, accumulate, restrain, rear, breed

  The trigrams: Wind above Heaven.
  Wind moves high in heaven, small accumulation. The noble one cultivates the pattern of virtue.
  One of the meanigs of Xu, wind, is to calculate. There are many stories or beliefs that the world is created by calculation, and the fate of creatures is decided by 'counting' them. 'Your number is called' when fate decides the soldier has to die that day, or the disease will end a life.
  But there is also the simple day to day living. The farmer looks at the sky every morning what the weather will bring. The same way everyone looks all the time what the next moment will bring, consciously or unconsciously, and acts accordingly. Maybe it is what one hears, facts or rumors, or what one sees, expressions or events. We do it all the time.
  In this hexagram, with Heaven inside, one lives life according to the laws of Heaven. Not towards a big important goal or according to personal wishes, but following the timing of Heaven, day in day out.

More about hexagrams 9 and 10

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