Thunder
Appears in fifteen chapters
Where the image appears
Thunder is the arousing shock of spring: life energy bursting up from below, terrifying and fertile at once. Its trigram, Chên, is the eldest son, a single strong line pressing upward beneath two yielding ones, and its full portrait is 51 Chên - The Arousing (Shock, Thunder):
SHOCK brings success.
Shock comes-oh, oh!
Laughing words -ha, ha!
The shock terrifies for a hundred miles,
And he does not let fall the sacrificial spoon and chalice.
Terror here is not the end but the beginning of composure. "When a man has learned within his heart what fear and trembling mean, he is safeguarded against any terror produced by outside influences," and the reverent man carries the sacrificial rite through unbroken while the thunder rolls.
Underground, thunder is the young light of winter. In 24 Fu - Return (The Turning Point), "Thunder within the earth" marks the solstice, when "the life energy, symbolized by thunder, the Arousing, is still underground. Movement is just at its beginning; therefore it must be strengthened by rest." Rolling under heaven in 25 Wu Wang - Innocence (The Unexpected), it wakes the world into spring: "Under heaven thunder rolls: All things attain the natural state of innocence." And resounding out of the earth in 16 Yü - Enthusiasm, it moves the ancient kings to make music and offer it "with splendor To the Supreme Deity."
The thunderstorm is the book's standing image for release of tension. In 03 Chun - Difficulty at the Beginning, where thunder and rain fill the air with teeming chaos, "A thunderstorm brings release from tension, and all things breathe freely again." The thought returns in 40 Hsieh - Deliverance: "A thunderstorm has the effect of clearing the air; the superior man produces a similar effect when dealing with mistakes and sins of men," passing over the unintentional "just as thunder dies away."
The Taoist note is the shock that renews rather than destroys. It resembles the Tao Te Ching's violent weather that cannot last the morning yet clears the sky, and Chuang Tzu's delight in the thunderclap that startles the complacent awake: fear of the arousing as the beginning, not the enemy, of ease.