Dui · The Joyous

Judgment and Plain-Language Notes

Dui: Success. Steadfast correctness is beneficial.

The Tuan commentary glosses Dui as delight, held up by firmness at the centre and gentleness on the outside, and insists that delight must accord with correctness to stand. Lead people through gladness and they forget their toil, even their fear of death. The Xiang image is two lakes joined and feeding one another, with friends discussing and practising together.

Dui above, Dui below. Two lakes lie side by side, and the hexagram is about pleasure and about speech. Its root sense is to be glad: to say aloud what pleases you, and to be the reason someone else is glad. The judgement is short, granting success and favouring correctness. Delight is good in itself, but it only holds if it rests on honest ground. The lines move from open, unbiased warmth, through pleasure built on trust, to deliberate ingratiation that turns out badly, hesitation between two sides, trust placed in someone who is eroding you, and finally pleasure you were led into. Delight that came from flattery is the first to collapse.

The judgment directly affirms progress, and its commentary highly praises joy's influence as making people forget toil and death. Most lines are favorable: harmonious joy in the first nine, sincere joy with vanished regret in the second, and joy after distinguishing affliction in the fourth. Negatives concern flawed motives for pleasing: the third's approaching joy brings misfortune from an inappropriate position, the fifth trusts what strips away and faces danger, and the top's induced joy lacks illumination. Conditions are positive, with risk in pleasing to win approval, hence the rating: Rather Good rather than the best. This is the app's interpretation of the text, not a guarantee of outcomes.

Worth doing: exchange views frankly and share good feeling in ways you can sustain. Avoid: over-promising to keep people happy, or using a light atmosphere to dodge the real problem.

Understand This Hexagram Through Its Structure

Dui upon Dui: two pleasures stacked, each broken line at the top of its half.

• Recognise the hexagram whose two halves are both Dui.
• State how Dui and Xun are related structurally.
• Say that flipping the third line of The Joyous gives Resolute Parting.

Both halves of Dui are Dui: in each, the lower two lines are solid and the top one is broken. The broken lines of the figure are the third and sixth. It is the vertical mirror of Xun: Xun has its broken lines at the base of each half, Dui at the top.

Dui is a lake, pleasure, speaking out. Each broken line sits at the top of its half, so the opening is at the summit with solidity beneath. The hexagram reads as joy, and its condition is in the structure: the lower two lines are solid, so speaking out presupposes something underneath. Empty pleasure does not stand up here.

A teaching example, not a prediction: a team is willing to talk about problems openly because the trust and records underneath are solid. Dui describes that structure.

The Six Lines: Original Text and Reflection

Nine at the beginning: Harmonious joy. Good fortune.

The Xiang commentary says the good fortune of harmonious delight comes from conduct that has not yet attracted any suspicion.

You meet people evenly, taking no side, and the pleasure that follows is favourable. What matters is that the conduct is plain enough to leave nothing to doubt.

When you first join a group, the same courtesy to everyone is what gets you accepted. Not rushing to pick a side is the most valuable thing you hold at this stage.

When you are good to people, are you quietly tallying the return?

Nine in the second place: Sincere joy. Good fortune; regret vanishes.

The Xiang commentary says the good fortune of trustworthy delight rests on a will that can itself be trusted. The gladness is not performed.

Pleasure that grows out of dealing honestly with people is favourable, and earlier regret falls away with it, because the gladness is genuine rather than staged.

You do not need to be a good talker. If everything you say holds, people come to you on their own. Credit repairs a relationship better than eloquence does.

Of the things you promised recently, how many did you actually do?

Six in the third place: Approaching joy. Misfortune.

The Xiang commentary attributes the misfortune of coming forward to please to a position that does not fit: both the motive and the standing are out of place.

You step up to win someone's favour, and it goes badly. The position was never the right one, so the harder you court approval the more the strain shows.

Accommodating people past your own limits to be liked looks warm for a while, then stops being taken seriously. If you want weight, build something worth weighing first.

Have you agreed to something you did not want, just to be liked?

Nine in the fourth place: Considering joy, not yet at peace. Distinguishing affliction brings happiness.

The Xiang commentary marks the gladness of this line as an occasion for congratulation. To shut off the harmful part, in the sense of holding a boundary, is what produces it.

You weigh one side against the other and cannot settle. Once you can seal off the part that is doing harm, the gladness arrives.

Being pulled by two kinds of people makes unease normal. Rather than trying to offend neither, work out which side is costing you and put distance there.

Of the two choices holding you up, which one is draining you?

Nine in the fifth place: Trusting what strips away. There is danger.

The Xiang commentary notes that the position here is properly correct. Precisely because the standing is sound, the danger clearly comes from the party trusted rather than from the place you occupy.

You give your trust to a side that is wearing you away, and danger follows. Nothing is wrong with where you stand; the error is in whom you trusted.

You are in the right role and have handed your trust to someone who depletes you. You do not have to doubt your judgement in general, but you do have to look at that one relationship again.

Is there someone you keep giving to who has never given back?

Six at the top: Induced joy.

The Xiang commentary says only that this drawn-out delight is not yet bright. No judgement of fortune is attached: pleasure arrived at by being led is simply not creditable.

Someone else pulls you along into the pleasure. The text attaches neither good nor bad fortune, and the commentary says only that such gladness has no brightness to it. It is not yours.

You get taken to the lively occasion you did not want to attend, and you are present without being there. You need not cut it off at once, but you can ask whose enjoyment this is.

How much of your recent enjoyment did you actually choose?

Try It Yourself

Flip the third line to yang and see what the lower trigram and the name become.

This page has a hands-on exercise. It is built into the Traditional Chinese page: open the interactive exercise.

Quick Quiz