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Unified Pattern — Pair of two — YANG + YIN mutant, 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 Pair of two — YANG + YIN mutant, one of the 8 admissible families (out of 15) in the system's classification — see the lexicon for how families are built and admitted.

Tricolour — three independent colours

The pattern's three colour classes, set independently — change one, the other two stay put.

Cell
Tiling
Monochrome — one tint

One tint, read in light and dark — a luminance reading, not three colours with two greyed out.

Cell
Tiling

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:

LevelLineGrid readColour 1 (violet)Colour 2 (magenta)Colour 3 (orange)
1brokenYANG mutant888
2brokenYANG mutant888
3solidYANG888
4brokenYANG mutant888
5brokenYANG mutant888
6brokenYANG mutant888
Whole cell484848

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
{
 "famille": "par2:yang+yin_mut",
 "hexagramme": 4,
 "complement_binaire": 59,
 "layer_of": [
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  ]
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  ]
 ]
}

Neighbouring motifs

The previous and next hexagram within the same family, Pair of two — YANG + YIN mutant.

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© 2026 Anibal Edelberto Amiot — CC BY-NC 4.0 · Created in collaboration with Claude