Kun Palace

The nine palaces are the ground layer of a chart — what the terrain is worth to the question being asked: the environment, the living space, the compass direction, and the part of the body that answers to it. Kun takes the Southwest and belongs to Earth. Every one of its three lines is broken, so there is nothing solid anywhere in the trigram and nothing in it that pushes. What it takes its image from is the ground itself, which does not lead and does not resist — it carries, and everything else grows on top of it. The word it gathers into is yielding. Kun is also where the middle of the chart gets read: the Center Palace (中宫) has no trigram and no gate of its own, so the star and the stems that fall there are brought over here.

• Places and settings: land and buildings that are flat, broad and old — fields, plains, villages, pasture, farmland, the outskirts of a town, the place a family came from. Also single-storey and older houses, grain stores, storerooms, assembly halls and produce markets: spaces built to hold things or to gather people.
• People and matters: the mother, the grandmother, an older woman, the woman of the house. Kun also stands for people in the plural — the citizenry, the public, village officials, assistants, farmers, and those who work with their hands in textiles or in building. A Kun matter tends to involve a lot of people and a lot of loose ends.
• Body: the abdomen, the spleen and stomach, the muscles, and the female reproductive organs.
• State of things: steady, level and thick, but slow. Kun makes progress by laying down one layer at a time; it does not cross a gap in a single step.

Kun and the central fifth palace have to be remembered together. The Center Palace has neither a trigram nor a gate, so the Tian-Qin star and any stems it carries are customarily read across here at palace two. Which means that some of what is being read at Kun did not start at Kun — it arrived from the middle, and it is worth knowing which of the two you are looking at.

Nature

Accommodating and grounded, with real weight given to keeping the whole arrangement stable and at peace. The instinct of the person involved is to take something on rather than push it back, and to help a thing succeed rather than be seen doing it. Nothing is rushed for the sake of appearances, because what is being watched is the long result. Mild to look at, and considerably harder to move than it appears.

Style

Never first, always still there. The person involved is good at matching the pace of what is going on and holding the whole picture up underneath it — steady the situation first, then push it forward slowly. Execution and follow-through matter more here than brilliance, and the more unsettled the environment becomes, the more obvious it is who is holding it.

Strength

Carrying capacity, and the knack of pulling scattered resources together until they settle into a system that keeps running and puts down roots. Logistics, operations, management and support roles are the fit — and the more patience the person involved has, the thicker the result.

Impression

Warm, solid, easy to be around, with a wide unhurried presence. No sharp edges on display and no way to do without them either: this is very often the stable base a whole team is standing on.

Pitfall

Giving way becomes a reflex, and the needs of the person involved go to the bottom of the list every time. Responsibility keeps being accepted until the load is genuinely too heavy, the slow pace costs the moment when acting first would have worked, and a fear of disturbing the peace turns into a refusal to change anything at all. Left long enough that adds up to exhaustion, and to a grievance that was never once said out loud.

For a dwelling, this palace supplies two things: what the whole building looks like when the Earth of Kun is strong, and which kinds of place out in the surrounding environment belong to Kun.

• When the energy is strong: the footprint is broad and open, the interior is bright and roomy, the whole property is orderly — the first impression a Kun house gives is simply that there is plenty of room.
• Places in the wider environment that belong to Kun: fields, open country, villages and level ground — flat, broad, unbroken land.

The strong-energy description is a verdict on the whole building rather than on any one room, and the list of places is a category of outdoor environment. At the level of the nine palaces there is still no table saying which room of a house each palace answers to.

When the indicator lands in this palace, the direction you take is Southwest. This mapping is fixed and does not vary by matter.