Heaven and Earth
Appears in fourteen chapters
Where the image appears
Heaven and earth are the father and mother of every image in the Book of Changes: the Creative above, the Receptive below, whose union is the origin of life and whose estrangement is the root of every barren time. The book states each pole in its first two hexagrams. Of 01 Ch'ien - The Creative it says:
The movement of heaven is full of power.
Thus the superior man makes himself strong and
untiring.
And of 02 K'un - The Receptive:
The earth's condition is receptive devotion.
Thus the superior man who has breadth of character
Carries the outer world.
Whether the two powers meet decides the character of the age. In 11 T'ai - Peace, "Heaven and earth unite: the image of PEACE," and the commentary explains that "Heaven has placed itself beneath the earth, and so their powers unite in deep harmony. Then peace and blessing descend upon all living things." Its shadow is 12 P'i - Standstill (Stagnation):
Heaven and earth do not unite:
The image of STANDSTILL.
There "Heaven and earth are out of communion and all things are benumbed." The whole moral weather of a time, prosperity or decay, is read from this single fact of contact or estrangement.
Every lesser union in the book rehearses the cosmic one. In 31 Hsien - Influence (Wooing) the courtship of youth is grounded in the law that "Heaven and earth attract each other and thus all creatures come into being," and in 54 Kuei Mei - The Marrying Maiden marriage itself is traced to the source: "For the union of heaven and earth is the origin of the whole of nature." Ruler and minister, husband and wife, the strong placing itself below the weak: each is a small repetition of heaven going beneath the earth in Peace. The image recurs wherever the book treats beginnings, from 03 Chun - Difficulty at the Beginning, the first meeting of the two powers, to the taming and increase of hexagrams 26 and 42.
The Taoist parallel is exact. Tao Te Ching 42 teaches that the ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang, and the cosmogonic pairing of chapters 1 and 6, the nameless origin and the valley spirit as the root of heaven and earth, is the same thought the Changes builds into its first two hexagrams.