Kuei Mei / The Marrying Maiden
above:Ch^en The Arousing, Thunder
below:Tui The Joyous, Lake
Kwei Mei indicates that (under the conditions which it
denotes) action will be evil, and in no wise advantageous.
Overall Meaning
Marrying maiden, the symbol of marriage
Mei Kwei is a common way of saying that a young lady is married, or,
literally, 'is going home'. If the order of the characters be reversed, the
verb kwei will be transitive, and the phrase will signify 'the marrying away
of a daughter', or 'the giving the young lady in marriage'. In the name of
this hexagram, Kwei is used with this transitive force. But Mei means 'a
younger sister', and not merely a young lady or a daughter. Kwei Mei might
be equivalent to our 'giving in marriage'; but we shall find that the special
term has a special appropriateness. The Thwan makes the hexagram give a bad
auspice concerning its subject; and for this the following reasons are given:
- According to Wan's symbolism of the trigrams, Tui, the lower trigram here,
denotes the youngest daughter, and Chan, the upper trigram, the oldest son.
And as the action of the hexagram begins with that of the lower trigram, we
have in the figure two violations of propriety. First, the marriage
represented is initiated by the lady and her friends. She goes to her future
home instead of the bridegroom coming to fetch her. Second, the parties are
unequally matched. There ought not to be such disparity of age between them.
Another reason assigned for the bad auspice is that lines 2, 3, 4, and 5 are
all in places not suited to them, quite different from the corresponding
lines in the preceding hexagram.
Is then such a marriage as the above, or marriage in general, the theme
of the hexagram? I think not. The marriage comes in, as in the preceding
essay, by way of illustration. With all the abuses belonging to it as an
institution of his country, as will immediately appear, the writer
acknowledged it without saying a word in deprecation or correction of those
abuses; but from the case he selected he wanted to set forth some principles
which should obtain in the relation between a ruler and his ministers. This
view is insisted on in Wan Ching's 'New Collection of Comments on the Yi'
(A.D, 1686)'.