大壯 → 需
Hexagram 34: Great Power → Hexagram 5: Waiting
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 2 changing lines (lines 4, 5).
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 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
君不明德，臣亂為惑，丞相命馬，胡亥失所。
The ruler lacks luminous virtue; the minister sows chaos and delusion. The prime minister commands the horse; Huhai loses his rightful place.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
Thunder over heaven demands that power obey propriety, yet here the sovereign abandons virtue entirely. The verse names its figures plainly: the chancellor 'commands the horse' — an unmistakable allusion to Zhao Gao, who pointed at a deer and called it a horse, bending reality itself to his will. Huhai, the Second Emperor of Qin, loses his throne and his life because he surrendered judgment to a manipulator. When the ruler lacks moral clarity, the minister's corruption fills the vacuum. From Great Power to Waiting, the transformation is bitterly ironic: clouds gather above heaven in Xu, promising nourishment that never arrives. Power that should sustain the realm instead hangs suspended, inert, while those who should wait patiently for the right moment have already seized control through deception.
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