Upper trigram
☲
Fire (Li) above
Clarity and attachment.
FamilyMiddle daughter
ElementFire
Hexagram 30 of 64
I Ching hexagram 30 ☲☲ The Clinging
I Ching hexagram 30, The Clinging, is fire above, fire below. In brief: fire doubled — brightness that depends on fuel. Counting from the bottom, its solid lines sit in places 1, 3, 4 and 6 and its broken lines in 2 and 5.
- Lines, bottom up
- ⚊⚋⚊⚊⚋⚊ 101101 · 1 = solid
- Trigrams
- Fire over Fire Li ☲ / Li ☲
- Every line changed
- № 29 The Abysmal
- In Legge, 1882
- p. 120 Sacred Books of the East, vol. 16
Legge, The Yî King, 1882.
Lower trigram
☲
Fire (Li) below
Clarity and attachment.
FamilyMiddle daughter
ElementFire
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What the text says, in plain terms
The Judgement and the Image of hexagram 30
The Judgement
Clinging, like fire to fuel. Clarity and brightness depend on what they are attached to, so choose carefully what you depend on, and cultivate gentleness.
The Image
Light rising twice, one brightness after another. The lesson is to carry clarity forward and let it illuminate everything around you.
A summary of meaning written for this site, not a translation — James Legge’s 1882 translation of the full text follows below. How the Judgement and the Image are read, and which translations to use →
Primary source
Hexagram 30 in James Legge’s translation
“Lî indicates that, (in regard to what it denotes), it will be advantageous to be firm and correct, and that thus there will be free course and success. Let (its subject) also nourish (a docility like that of) the cow, and there will be good fortune.”
“(The trigram for) brightness, repeated, forms Lî. The great man, in accordance with this, cultivates more and more his brilliant (virtue), and diffuses its brightness over the four quarters (of the land).”
The lines
- Line 1 · bottom The first line, undivided, shows one ready to move with confused steps. But he treads at the same time reverently, and there will be no mistake.
- Line 2 The second line, divided, shows its subject in his place in yellow. There will be great good fortune.
- Line 3 The third line, undivided, shows its subject in a position like that of the declining sun. Instead of playing on his instrument of earthenware, and singing to it, he utters the groans of an old man of eighty. There will be evil.
- Line 4 The fourth line, undivided, shows the manner of its subject’s coming. How abrupt it is, as with fire, with death, to be rejected (by all)!
- Line 5 The fifth line, divided, shows its subject as one with tears flowing in torrents, and groaning in sorrow. There will be good fortune.
- Line 6 · top The topmost line, undivided, shows the king employing its subject in his punitive expeditions. Achieving admirable (merit), he breaks (only) the chiefs (of the rebels). Where his prisoners were not their associates, he does not punish. There will be no error.
James Legge, trans., The Yî King, The Sacred Books of the East, vol. 16 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882), p. 120 — read the original text.
Words in parentheses are Legge’s own: in his preface he explains that they supply what the original writer left unsaid. “Undivided” and “divided” are his terms for yang and yin lines, counted from the bottom. The Image comes from the second appendix of the book, the Treatise on the Symbolism.
The Clinging for a decision
Make sure your plan rests on something reliable. Clear thinking and understanding are your strengths — pair them with humility.
I Ching 30 in love and relationships
Attachment and mutual dependence. Healthy when both people give light to each other; draining when one only consumes.
Hexagram 30 at work
Communication, teaching, publishing and anything that brings clarity. Know which resources your work relies on.
The six lines of hexagram 30
Read from the bottom up. This figure runs yang yin yang yang yin yang — what each position means.
4 yang and 2 yin lines. Three of the six stand in their proper place, and none of the three pairs answer each other.
What the two trigrams do to each other
Inner and outer
Fire below — clarity and attachment — is the private, inner side of hexagram 30.
Fire above — clarity and attachment — is the world that side meets.
The five-element relation
Both trigrams are Fire, so nothing in the figure pulls against anything else. That makes the reading unusually single-minded — and unusually short of internal correction.
Read as a family
The middle daughter sits both above and below. The same figure doubled — the purest form of what the trigram describes.
Calculated from the lines
Hexagrams connected to hexagram 30
Nuclear hexagram
28 · Great Exceeding
What is happening beneath the surface.
Lines 2–4 give Xun (Wind) as the lower trigram, lines 3–5 give Dui (Lake) as the upper.
Opposite hexagram
29 · The Abysmal
The situation turned inside out.
Change all six lines and Fire over Fire becomes Water over Water.
Inverse hexagram
Symmetrical
Hexagram 30 reads the same upside down: Fire over Fire, turned over, is still Fire over Fire. Only eight of the sixty-four do.
None of these are assigned by an author — each follows from the arrangement of lines.
The image
Fire above, Fire below.
Fire over Fire: clarity and attachment meeting clarity and attachment.
Sources
Statements of fact on this page were checked against these sources in October 2026. How we choose and check sources: editorial policy.
Cite this page
AstroHot. “I Ching Hexagram 30: The Clinging.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://astrohot.com/i-ching/hexagram/30/
For Wikipedia
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