大壯 → 萃
Hexagram 34: Great Power → Hexagram 45: Gathering Together
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 4 changing lines (lines 1, 2, 3, 5).
Line 1
初九 壯于趾。征凶有孚。
Nine at the beginning means: Power in the toes. Continuing brings misfortune. This is certainly true.
Line 2
九二 貞吉。
Nine in the second place means: Perseverance brings good fortune.
Line 3
九三 小人用壯。君子用罔。貞厲。羝羊觸藩。羸其角。
Nine in the third place means: The inferior man works through power. The superior man does not act thus. To continue is dangerous. A goat butts against a hedge And gets its horns entangled.
Line 5
六五 喪羊于易。无悔。
Six in the fifth place means: Loses the goat with ease. No remorse.
Trigram Changes
Yilin Verse
空穿漏敝，破桴殘缺，陰弗能完，瓦碎不全。
Pierced through, leaking and worn; the raft broken, in tatters. What is hollow cannot be made whole; tiles shattered, nothing intact.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
Thunder above heaven meets only hollowness and ruin. Everything is pierced through and threadbare, the raft broken and incomplete. The yin element cannot make things whole, and tiles shatter into fragments. The verse is a catalogue of structural failure — not dramatic collapse but chronic decay, things wearing through until nothing holds together. From Great Power to Gathering, the lake rests upon the earth in Cui, the image of congregation and preparation for the unexpected. The transformation is deeply ironic: Gathering depends on intact vessels to hold what is collected, yet every container in this verse is cracked. Power that cannot maintain its own infrastructure will find its attempts to gather and consolidate defeated by the holes through which resources leak away.
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