Unified Pattern — Triple — without YANG mutant, hexagram 17 (Zhun, Difficulty at the Beginning — King Wen no. 3)
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 Zhun, Difficulty at the Beginning. Binary numbering 0–63; in brackets, the traditional King Wen number.
Family Triple — without YANG 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.
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 | solid | YANG | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| 2 | broken | YANG mutant | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| 3 | broken | YANG mutant | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| 4 | broken | YANG mutant | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| 5 | solid | YANG | 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 a quarter turn, a half turn.
Hexagram 17 (King Wen no. 3) — Difficulty at the Beginning
Upper trigram ☵ Kan (The Abysmal, Water); lower trigram ☳ Zhen (The Arousing, Thunder).
Image
Cloud and Thunder: the image of initial difficulty. Above, water not yet rain; below, the shock that seeks its way without yet finding it. Nothing flows freely, everything searches, everything hesitates at the edge of its own birth. This is the figure of a cluttered beginning, one that must clear itself a path before even knowing where it leads. Thus the noble one, faced with initial disorder, forces nothing: he brings order by patiently weaving the threads together, strand by strand, without yielding to impatience for the outcome.
Judgement — Germination
The seed struggles beneath the earth of the square. Every birth begins in darkness and resistance: the seed does not yet know the form it will take, it only knows how to push. This line speaks of a difficulty that is not a failure but the very condition of any true beginning — nothing great has ever emerged without first having to break free of what held it back.
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 − 17 = 46). 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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"hexagramme": 17,
"complement_binaire": 46,
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}
Neighbouring motifs
The previous and next hexagram within the same family, Triple — without YANG mutant.
