Three broken lines, three open doors — the ground that takes everything in and asks for nothing.
Kun is the pure yin trigram: three broken lines, ☷, each with its gap at the center, offering no resistance anywhere. It is Earth, the receptive ground that receives the sky's giving and turns it into form — soil, body, matter, the substance in which every seed must be planted before it can become anything. Where Qian initiates, Kun completes; where Qian is the will that decides, Kun is the patience that carries and brings to term. This is not weakness but a different strength: the yielding that outlasts the rigid, the softness that water uses to carve stone.
Its action is receptivity, devotion, nourishing support — the capacity to hold and sustain. In the family of the eight, Kun is the Mother, the field into which the Father's energy descends and from which the six children are born. Among the elements it maps cleanly onto Earth, cold and dark and fertile.
In the Earlier Heaven arrangement Kun sits at the bottom, at the north, directly opposite Qian above it — the two poles between which all the other trigrams are strung. In the Later Heaven arrangement it takes the Southwest, the place of nourishment and the receptive mother-ground. In divination Kun counsels yielding rather than forcing, service rather than command, the wisdom of the one who supports and endures; its shadow is passivity that never acts at all, the ground that swallows what it was meant to grow.
The Figure
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Glyph | ☷ |
| Image | Earth |
| Attribute | Receptive, yielding |
| Family | Mother |
| Direction (Later Heaven) | Southwest |
| Nearest Element | Earth |