One broken line caught between two solid — the flame that has no substance of its own and shines only by clinging to what it burns.
Li is the trigram of Fire, ☲: a single broken yin line held between two solid yang lines — the exact inverse of its sibling Kan, where a yang line hides between two yin. The hollow at the center is the secret of fire: a flame is not a thing but a process, with nothing solid at its heart, and it endures only by clinging to fuel outside itself. So Li is the Clinging, and also the Light — brightness, clarity, awareness, the illumination by which anything is seen at all. What Kan hides in the depths, Li displays on the surface.
As the second of Qian's daughters, receiving her yin line in the middle place, Li is the Middle Daughter. Its element is plainly Fire, and the Later Heaven arrangement crowns it at the South, the direction of high summer and full noon, the place of maximum light. Across the great water-fire axis it faces Kan in the North — flame and abyss, the clinging light and the hidden light, the two complementary poles of the middle generation.
In divination Li speaks of clarity, intelligence, and vision — the capacity to see and to make things visible — but it carries fire's dependence in its center: brilliance that has nothing to stand on, that must attach itself to something solid to keep burning. Its counsel is to let one's light cling to what is worth illuminating, and to remember that a fire feeding on the wrong fuel consumes itself.
The Figure
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Glyph | ☲ |
| Image | Fire |
| Attribute | Clinging, light |
| Family | Middle daughter |
| Direction (Later Heaven) | South |
| Nearest Element | Fire |