大壯 → 賁
Hexagram 34: Great Power → Hexagram 22: Grace
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 3 changing lines (lines 2, 4, 6).
Line 2
九二 貞吉。
Nine in the second place means: Perseverance brings good fortune.
Line 4
九四 貞吉。悔亡。藩決不羸。壯于大輿之輹。
Nine in the fourth place means: Perseverance brings good fortune. Remorse disappears. The hedge opens; there is no entanglement. Power depends upon the axle of a big cart.
Line 6
上六 羝羊觸藩。不能退。不能遂。无攸利。艱則吉。
Six at the top means: A goat butts against a hedge. It cannot go backward, it cannot go forward. Nothing serves to further. If one notes the difficulty, this brings good fortune.
Trigram Changes
Yilin Verse
回隤不安，兵革為患，掠我妻子，客屬飢寒。
Turmoil and upheaval without rest; weapons and war bring disaster. They seize our wives and children; the sojourners are left in hunger and cold.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
Thunder above heaven shakes the realm into ruin: the fortress walls crumble, armies rampage through the land, wives and children are seized, and the displaced endure cold and hunger. The verse depicts the devastation of war with unflinching directness — no allegory, no mythological distance, just the raw reality of military occupation. From Great Power to Grace, fire glows beneath the mountain in Bi, the hexagram of adornment and civilization. The transformation is savagely ironic: where there should be cultural refinement and aesthetic order, there is only plunder. Grace stripped bare reveals its dependence on stability; when the thunderclap of unrestrained power shatters civil society, beauty becomes the first casualty.
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