Also known as: 習坎 · 重坎 · Hexagram 29 · ䷜
Kan Wei Shui (坎為水 ䷜) is hexagram 29 of the I Ching's 64 hexagrams, formed by doubling the Kan (☵) trigram.
Kan Wei Shui, traditionally titled 習坎 ("the repeated pit"), is the 29th hexagram, doubling the Water trigram (☵ over ☵). Its judgement "有孚，維心亨" teaches that when danger piles upon danger, inner sincerity keeps the heart open and allows passage through.
The Great Image reads "水洊至，習坎；君子以常德行，習教事" ("Water flows on without pause; the noble person keeps virtue constant and practises the work of teaching"). In divination this hexagram warns of successive hazards, yet promises that consistency and truthfulness carry one safely across.
The figure is one yang line trapped between two yin lines; doubled, two yang lines are trapped, which is why the tradition speaks of danger repeated and not of danger enlarged. Its opposite is Li (離為火), and like Li it is unchanged when turned upside down. Its nuclear hexagram, built from lines two to four and three to five, is Yi (頤), the figure of nourishment. Commentators tend to stop on that detail: something is being sustained inside the difficulty.
The commentarial layer around Kan is unusually physical. The Tuan commentary observes that water flows without ever filling up, and moves through danger without losing its trustworthiness, putting motion and reliability into one image. The Shuogua (說卦傳) assigns Water a cluster of images that all involve being enclosed or hidden: channels and ditches, concealment, bows and wheels, and among human conditions, added anxiety, heart trouble, ear pain and blood. Water is the middle son among the eight trigram family relations, and in the later-heaven arrangement it holds due north. Among the body correspondences of the same text, Kan is the ears.
Even the name is disputed. The character 習 in 習坎 has been glossed as “repeated”, giving danger upon danger, and also as “practised”, giving danger one has trained for; both readings are old and both survive in the commentaries. Some scholars have gone further and argued that the character is an intrusion into the text, and that the hexagram's proper name is simply Kan. Commentators also differ over whether to emphasise Kan as a pit one falls into or as a risk one crosses, which is enough to change the tone of a reading of the same line.
In an actual reading Kan usually points to obstruction, repetition, matters conducted out of sight, and difficulties involving water, land or documents. The fifth line, central and strong, says the pit is not yet filled: the danger is levelling off but has not finished, so consolidating beats pressing forward. The first and last lines carry the heaviest language, falling into the hole at the start and long confinement at the end, and in line divination Kan belongs to the water palace with its self line at the top and no responsive partner, read as facing the difficulty without much help. None of that amounts to a verdict of failure, and taking it that way ignores the judgement itself, which says the heart stays open and that conduct is worth something. Kan is not simply a disaster hexagram or a hexagram about floods; its image set includes concealment and labour, and by extension the kind of intelligence that finds a way through. The sincerity the judgement asks for is closer to keeping one's word consistently under pressure than to reassuring oneself that things will be fine.
Kan and Li are the tightest pair in the book after Qian and Kun. One is a yang line held inside yin, the other a yin line held inside yang; one sits due north, the other due south; one is water, the other fire. Later internal-alchemy writing built its language of joining water and fire directly on this relation. The three-line Kan trigram (坎 kǎn, ☵) is again a component and not a situation. Set beside Qian, the contrast is between strength exercised in the open and strength exercised while hemmed in.
It is one of the more difficult figures, but the tradition does not read it as a straightforward bad omen. Its judgement explicitly says that inner sincerity keeps the heart open and that conduct still counts for something, which is the opposite of a hopeless verdict. What it does indicate is difficulty that recurs instead of resolving at once, so readings usually emphasise consistency and keeping commitments over trying to force a quick exit.
The character 習 has two long-established glosses and commentators have never fully settled between them. Read as “repeated”, it gives the sense of danger piled on danger, which matches the doubled structure of the hexagram. Read as “practised” or “rehearsed”, it gives danger that one has been through before and can therefore handle. A minority view holds that the character entered the text by accident and that the hexagram is properly called just Kan.
The traditional counsel is to keep to what is constant instead of forcing a way out. In practice that has a negative half and a positive half: do not over-commit, do not take on new obligations while the old ones are unsettled, and do expect the matter to need more than one pass before it clears. The sincerity the judgement asks for is behavioural, measured by whether commitments already made are still honoured once they have become inconvenient. The hexagram prescribes a manner of moving and does not forecast the outcome.
They are an exact opposite pair: change every line of one and you get the other. Kan is a yang line enclosed by yin, Li a yin line enclosed by yang; in the later-heaven arrangement Kan holds due north and Li due south; one is water and one is fire. Both are also unchanged when turned upside down, which is why the tradition groups them with Qian and Kun as structural anchors of the sixty-four.