Marriage and Courtship
Appears in thirteen chapters
Where the image appears
Marriage and courtship is the union of the sexes as the human mirror of heaven and earth. The image recurs because, for the Book of Changes, every joining of strong and weak rehearses the cosmic pairing: as 54 Kuei Mei - The Marrying Maiden puts it, "For the union of heaven and earth is the origin of the whole of nature." Wilhelm counts four hexagrams devoted to the relationship of husband and wife: Influence, Duration, Development, and the Marrying Maiden.
Right courtship begins with the strong placing itself below the weak. In 31 Hsien - Influence (Wooing), where mountain bears lake, the Judgment reads, "Influence. Success. / Perseverance furthers. / To take a maiden to wife brings good fortune," and the commentary adds that "it is perseverance that makes the difference between seduction and courtship," for "Heaven and earth attract each other and thus all creatures come into being." Courtship also demands patience with the time. The wooing formula of 03 Chun - Difficulty at the Beginning, repeated in 22 Pi - Grace and 38 K'uei - Opposition, reads:
Horse and wagon part.
He is not a robber;
He wants to woo when the time comes.
The maiden is chaste,
She does not pledge herself.
Ten years--then she pledges herself.
In 53 Chien - Development (Gradual Progress) the same patience becomes ceremony: "The development of events that leads to a girl's following a man to his home proceeds slowly," and the formalities must be honored, for gradualness is what makes the bond endure. The Marrying Maiden then explores every wrong footing a relationship can stand on, from concubine to slave to the empty basket of the marriage kept up in form alone. Its finest line shows rank yielding to affection:
The sovereign I gave his daughter in marriage.
The embroidered garments of the princess
Were not as gorgeous
As those of the serving maid.
The Taoist parallel is Tao Te Ching 61: the large state wins the small by lying low. Hexagram 31 builds this into its very structure, the masculine trigram keeping still beneath the feminine, joyous one. In courtship as in statecraft, the strong wins by placing itself below.