Emptiness

Emptiness in the Book of Changes is never mere lack: it is the productive hollow, the condition of receiving, as the valley receives the waters. The Tao Te Ching built its physics on this thought. Chapter 11 finds that thirty spokes share one hub and it is the hole in the center that makes the wheel useful; chapter 4 calls the Tao an empty vessel, used but never filled; chapter 5 likens the space between heaven and earth to a bellows, empty yet inexhaustible. The Changes embodies the same insight structurally in 61 Chung Fu - Inner Truth, whose figure "consists of firm lines above and below, while it is open in the center. This indicates a heart free of prejudices and therefore open to truth." Even the hexagram's name-image is a hollow: "An egg is hollow. The light-giving power must work to quicken it from outside, but there must be a germ of life within, if life is to be awakened."

The receptive hollow recurs in the landscape. The mountain of 31 Hsien - Influence (Wooing) is stimulated by its lake "because its summit does not jut out as a peak but is sunken. The image counsels that the mind should be kept humble and free, so that it may remain receptive to good advice." And the law of 15 Ch'ien - Modesty makes emptiness the engine of fate itself: "It is the law of heaven to make fullness empty and to make full what is modest."

Yet the oracle distinguishes fertile emptiness from hollow form. In 08 Pi - Holding Together (union) sincerity is "Truth, like a full earthen bowl," where "the content is everything and the empty form nothing." In 54 Kuei Mei - The Marrying Maiden the inversion is fatal: "The woman holds the basket, but there are no fruits in it," the dead ritual of a bond that persists only outwardly. Emptiness furthers when it opens toward filling, the unprejudiced heart, the sunken summit, the hollow egg awaiting its germ; it condemns when it is the residue of a content that has died.