Unified Pattern — Bases — YANG, hexagram 4 (Qian, Modesty — King Wen no. 15)
One of 256 distinct Unified Patterns — a 12×12 Jacquard construction where every cell's colour is read off a single hexagram of the Yi King, hexagram Qian, Modesty. Binary numbering 0–63; in brackets, the traditional King Wen number.
Family Bases — YANG, one of the 8 admissible families (out of 15) in the system's classification — see the lexicon for how families are built and admitted.
The pattern's three colour classes, set independently — change one, the other two stay put.
One tint, read in light and dark — a luminance reading, not three colours with two greyed out.
Reading the cell, line by line
The 144 cells of the 12×12 cell fall into six levels of 24 cells, one per line of the hexagram. Where the line is solid (yang), the level takes its colours from the family's YANG grid; where it is broken (yin), from its YANG mutant grid. Count of each colour, level by level:
| Level | Line | Grid read | Colour 1 (violet) | Colour 2 (magenta) | Colour 3 (orange) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | broken | YANG mutant | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| 2 | broken | YANG mutant | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| 3 | solid | YANG | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| 4 | broken | YANG mutant | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| 5 | broken | YANG mutant | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| 6 | broken | YANG mutant | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Whole cell | 48 | 48 | 48 | ||
The three colours are exactly balanced: 48 cells each. The cell is unchanged by reflection in the vertical axis, reflection in the horizontal axis, a half turn.
Hexagram 4 (King Wen no. 15) — Modesty
Upper trigram ☷ Kun (The Receptive, the Earth); lower trigram ☶ Gen (Keeping Still, the Mountain).
Image
Within the Earth stands the mountain: the image of modesty. What is highest here allows itself to be contained by what surrounds it, never seeking to dominate the landscape by height alone. This is the figure of greatness that effaces itself willingly. Thus the noble one reduces what is excessive and increases what is lacking, weighing all things with equity: modesty is not smallness, it is strength secure enough in itself that it need not show itself.
Judgement — Alchemy
Self-effacement nourishes the transmutation within the crucible. Nothing truly transforms without some part of the self consenting to dissolve in the process. This line says that humility is not a passive virtue: it is the active condition of all deep transformation, the crucible where the old dissolves so the new may take shape.
The full hexagram page: the six lines, its magic square and the other patterns built on it.
Same shape, other colourings
Two involutions leave this motif's shape unchanged and only permute its three tints — verified across every family and every hexagram in the corpus, not just this one: swapping the pairing used to read the hexagram (YANG/YANG-mutant ↔ YIN/YIN-mutant), and taking the hexagram's binary complement (63 − 4 = 59). Toggle them below; the tiling never changes, only the colours do.
The grid itself
The 12×12 layer map and the three colour grids above, in the raw data — human-readable, and machine-readable as JSON.
Show the data
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Neighbouring motifs
The previous and next hexagram within the same family, Bases — YANG.
