Trigram
☶ Mountain
艮Gèn · Keeping Still
- Quality
- resting
- Family
- the youngest son
- Animal
- dog
- Body
- hand
- Direction
- northeast
- Season
- end of winter, start of spring
Mountain is the trigram of rest. Two broken lines at the bottom, one solid line on top. Wilhelm calls it Keeping Still: coming to a halt, and knowing when that is the right thing to do.
Movement that comes to rest
The image from nature is a mountain. It stands, it does not move, and yet it is not a dead thing. All kinds of things grow on its slopes, springs rise there, animals find shelter. The stillness of the mountain is a full stillness.
The lines show how that rest comes about. The yang line, the moving element, stands right at the top, on two yin lines. The strength has risen until it could go no further, and there it has stopped. Beneath it lies the soft, quiet and supported. The trigram is the reverse of Thunder, where the yang line sits at the bottom and wants to rise. In Mountain that movement has arrived. The quality that belongs to it is resting: not because there is no strength, but because the strength has found its place.
How Mountain shows up
Mountain is the moment you stop reacting and look first. The manager who does not decide straight away in a crisis, but sleeps on it. The athlete who knows rest is part of training. Someone who meditates, or simply walks for an hour without a phone, and afterwards sees more clearly what needs to happen.
Mountain is also about limits. Saying that it is enough. Not taking on one more project, not answering one more message. The rest of the mountain is not laziness, but the choice not to go further than the situation asks. The shadow side is rigidity: if all you do is keep still, you shut yourself off and miss the moment when it is time to move again. Keeping still works best at the right moment, and you let it go again once that moment has passed.
The youngest son and the dog
In the family, Mountain is the youngest son. His one yang line stands at the top, in the last place, and that makes him the youngest. Where the eldest son, Thunder, starts the movement, the youngest completes it. Together with Water, the middle son, the three sons show the whole course of a movement: the beginning, the dangerous middle and the rest at the end.
The animal is the dog, which guards the entrance and does not simply let anyone in. In the body Mountain is the hand: what holds on and holds back. In the arrangement of King Wen, the later heaven Wilhelm describes, Mountain stands in the northeast, at the end of winter and the start of spring. It is the place where the cycle of the year closes and begins again. What stands still prepares the new, the way a seed lies in the ground before it sprouts.
Mountain below, Mountain above
When Mountain is at the bottom of your hexagram, your inner attitude is calm and bounded. You know where you stand and you do not let yourself be rushed. In hexagram 15, Modesty, Mountain lies beneath Earth. The mountain, the high thing, hides beneath the level ground. It is the image of someone who has a lot inside and does not inflate it, and so leaves room for others.
When Mountain is at the top, the rest works as a limit from outside, or as an attitude you take on toward the world. In hexagram 26, The Taming Power of the Great, Mountain stands above Heaven. Great strength is held back and thereby gathered. It is the image of energy that is not spent at once, but saved until the moment it yields the most.
When Mountain doubles itself, in hexagram 52, Keeping Still, the rest is complete. There it is about quieting your own thinking, so that you act from clarity instead of restlessness.
Hexagrams with Mountain below
- 15
Modesty - 31
Influence - 33
Retreat - 39
Obstruction - 52
Keeping Still - 53
Development - 56
The Wanderer - 62
Preponderance of the Small
Hexagrams with Mountain above
- 4
Youthful Folly - 18
Work on What Has Been Spoiled - 22
Grace - 23
Splitting Apart - 26
The Taming Power of the Great - 27
The Corners of the Mouth - 41
Decrease - 52
Keeping Still