The Mountain
Appears in sixteen chapters
Where the image appears
The mountain is stillness, limit, and rest: the place where movement comes to an end and begins. Its trigram, Kên, is the youngest son, and its doubled form is 52 Kên - Keeping Still, Mountain, the book's instruction in the quiet heart:
KEEPING STILL. Keeping his back still
So that he no longer feels his body.
He goes into his courtyard
And does not see his people.
No blame.
The commentary is careful to make this stillness dynamic: "True quiet means keeping still when the time has come to keep still, and going forward when the time has come to go forward." Forced calm is condemned outright; "calmness must develop naturally out of a state of inner composure," never from artificial rigidity.
The mountain's stillness halts what should be halted. In 33 TUN - Retreat, "The mountain rises up under heaven, but owing to its nature it finally comes to a stop," and the superior man likewise "brings the inferior man to a standstill (mountain) by his dignified reserve." The same tranquility nourishes: in 18 Ku - Work on what has been spoiled (Decay) the mountain "gives tranquillity and nourishment to all that grows in its vicinity," and the nourishing thunder of hexagram 27 sounds at its foot.
Position gives the image its finer shades. A mountain within the earth is 15 Ch'ien - Modesty, height hidden under lowness; heaven within the mountain, in 26 Ta Ch'u - The Taming Power of the Great, "points to hidden treasures," the stored words and deeds of the past. In 23 Po - Splitting Apart the mountain resting on the earth is secure "only when it rises out of the earth broad and great, not proud and steep," and in 31 Hsien - Influence (Wooing) the summit that stays receptive is the one that is sunken, not jutting.
The Taoist note lies in hexagram 52's own commentary, which contrasts the stillness of the Changes with nirvana: "the Book of Changes holds that rest is merely a state of polarity that always posits movement as its complement." Stillness is not escape from the world of change but one pole of it, a thoroughly Taoist rejection of stillness for its own sake.