Li Wei Huo (離為火 ䷝) — Fire Doubled

Li Wei Huo is the 30th hexagram, doubling the Fire trigram (☲ over ☲). Fire has no substance of its own; it clings to what it burns. The judgement "利貞，亨。畜牝牛，吉" advises steadfastness and the gentle docility of a cow — clarity sustained by devotion rather than force.

The Great Image reads "明兩作，離；大人以繼明照于四方" ("A double brightness arises; the great person continues this light to illuminate the four directions"). In divination Li points to insight, culture, and visibility, but reminds that light depends on what it rests upon.

Unusually, this hexagram's name is defined inside the classic itself. The Tuan commentary glosses Li as “to cling”, and illustrates it with sun and moon clinging to the sky and grain and trees clinging to the soil. The sequence commentary makes the same point by linking it to the hexagram before: what has fallen into a pit must attach to something, and so Li follows. The Shuogua (說卦傳) adds the image list, fire, sun, lightning, the middle daughter, armour and weapons, and in the body correspondences Li is the eyes. In the later-heaven arrangement it holds due south.

Having a definition has not stopped the argument. One group of commentators follows the Tuan and reads Li strictly as attachment. Another appeals to the ordinary sense of the character, which in everyday Chinese means to leave or to part, and points to the fourth line's imagery of being burnt and discarded as support. A third position treats attaching and parting as two faces of one process, since whatever clings can also be detached. Commentators likewise disagree over whether the judgement's clause about a docile cow is practical self-cultivation advice or simply a favourable oracle formula.

The figure is one yin line held between two yang lines, and doubling it puts brightness above brightness. Its opposite is Kan (坎為水), and like Kan it is unchanged when the figure is inverted. Its nuclear hexagram, built from lines two to four and three to five, is Da Guo (大過), “great exceeding”, a structural hint that brilliance at full strength tends to overshoot; the line texts then make that explicit. The second line, central and correctly placed, is described as yellow clinging and greatly auspicious, cultivation that has not lost its balance. The third takes the image of the declining afternoon sun. The fourth carries the most violent language in the hexagram — coming abruptly, burning, dying, cast aside — and is read as brightness that has lost its footing and consumes itself.

Two further errors are worth naming. One is to treat brightness as a promise of smooth progress, when the third and fourth lines are both cautionary, one about decline and one about self-destruction. The other is to take the judgement's docile cow literally as advice about livestock; the tradition reads it as an image of gentleness that can be kept up. In practice the hexagram is consulted on reputation, examinations, documents, performance and visibility, and it reads poorly for anything that depends on staying concealed.

Li's pairing with Kan underlies a great deal of later symbolism, including the two “crossing” hexagrams built from water and fire that close the received sequence. As with the other doubled figures, the three-line Li trigram (離 lí, ☲) is a component quality, not a whole situation. The comparison with Qian (乾為天) is the more useful one at the table: both are bright and outward, and what separates them is not how bright they are but where the brightness is supplied from, Qian's strength being described as arising from within.