Favorable Turn Of Fortune

一陽来復, read ichiyō raifuku: one yang returns. The four characters name a picture from the Book of Changes, the hexagram called Return: six lines, five of them broken, and one unbroken line just arrived at the bottom. The old calendar hung a hexagram on each month, and the one yang line comes back in the eleventh month, at the winter solstice, the shortest day, when the light starts back. So the phrase is read at three distances, and the dictionaries keep all three: close up, the solstice and the eleventh month; a step back, winter going and the new year coming; a step further, a run of bad luck ending and good beginning, which is the sense the English title gives. The Song court said it to the emperor on the solstice morning, the great commentator Zhu Xi called it a single point of light in the great dark, faint and already unstoppable, and the Zen masters opened their solstice sermons with it, which is how it came to Japan. The war tales gave it its human sense, a dragon lying low through the three winter months and waiting for the sky of one yang returning, and in Edo the eleventh month was named for it, the month of Return. It is a solstice and a New Year's text as much as a text for a hard year, and what a person means who gives it in a hard year is that the turn has happened and cannot be undone. The four-character idiom (yojijukugo) 一陽来復 is composed of the kanji 一 (read ichi) meaning "one", 陽 (read yō) meaning "yang", 来 (read rai) meaning "comes", and 復 (read fuku) meaning "restoration".

This art encourages us that good fortune is just around the corner and would make a positive and inspirational gift.