Trigram for Wind

☴ means Xun, the Wind trigram in the I Ching. A trigram is a pattern of three solid or broken lines. Xun links wind with influence that enters gently and persists, rather than a single gust.

Xun took shape in the early Zhou Yi tradition, dated roughly 1100–700 BCE. The Zhou Yi used line patterns for divination—reading signs to forecast outcomes—not as stand-alone weather pictures. Tradition credits Fu Xi, a culture hero, with discovering the trigrams; this is a traditional attribution, not a confirmed account of one historical inventor.

A later explanatory text called the Shuo Gua, composed around 475–300 BCE, linked Xun with wood, the eldest daughter, the southeast, and other correspondences. These are ways to read the trigram within a system, not alternate weather forecasts.

How is ☴ used in the I Ching?

Read ☴ as one layer in a six-line hexagram. Two trigrams stack to make a hexagram. In common interpretive frameworks, the lower one describes the inner situation and the upper one the outward situation.

In the Earlier Heaven arrangement, ☴ and ☳ have inverse line patterns; ☳ is the Thunder trigram. The bagua, an arrangement of eight trigrams, and later feng shui systems also connect these signs with directions and other correspondences. Without the full diagram or a question, this one mark cannot settle every reading.