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Home · The 64 Hexagrams · Hexagram 34
大壯
Hexagram 34 · Dà Zhuàng

Great Power

大壯 · dà zhuàng
Power surges; pair strength with what is right.
Zhèn · Thunder
above
Qián · Heaven
below

Core Meaning

The Judgment: The Power of the Great: steadfastness rewards. Strength is justified only when joined with what is right.
The Image: Thunder fills the sky above heaven. So the wise person never walks a path that order does not sanction.

Thunder rising into heaven itself: Dà Zhuàng is the power of the great — vigor at its peak, strength that can finally act. Its entire counsel concerns what justifies that strength.

Power aligned with what is right advances the world; power alone becomes the goat that butts the hedge and tangles its horns. The wise, this hexagram says, do not even step where order does not sanction. True greatness is strength that has internalized its own limits.

Great Power in Your Question

Love & Relationships

Dà Zhuàng brings vigor into the heart's affairs — confidence to declare, energy to commit. Its warning is proportion: forcefulness that overrides the other's pace entangles like the butting goat. Strength in love shows as reliability and clear intention, not pressure. Pair the power with patience and it carries everything.

Career & Money

Professionally, this is peak-leverage season: resources, momentum, and position aligned for the decisive move. Its rules: act only where right and power coincide; avoid the first line's premature march from the toes; and prefer the fourth line's quiet axle-strength that carries loads to the display that merely impresses. Test the hedge before committing the horns.

Personal Growth

Inwardly, Dà Zhuàng examines your relationship with your own force — will, talent, temper at full strength. The practice is self-sanctioned limits: not treading paths that violate your own order, dropping the stubborn butting with ease when it is recognized. Strength that can stop itself is the only strength this book calls great.

The Six Lines

A line speaks only when it is a changing line in your own casting.

Line 1
Power in the toes, eager to march before its time. Pressing forward now brings certain misfortune.
Line 2
Resistance gives way; the gate begins to open. Steadfastness — not exultation — brings good fortune.
Line 3
The small parade their power; the wise do not. A goat butting the hedge only tangles its horns.
Line 4
The hedge opens and the horns come free; power rests in the axle of a great cart. Quiet strength that carries the load: good fortune.
Line 5
He loses the goat — the butting stubbornness — with ease, almost without noticing. No regret.
Line 6
The goat butts the hedge: cannot go back, cannot go through. Nothing prospers. But one who recognizes the impasse finds the difficulty ends in good fortune.

Related Hexagrams

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