蒙 → 蹇
Hexagram 4: Youthful Folly → Hexagram 39: Obstruction
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 4 changing lines (lines 2, 3, 5, 6).
Line 2
九二 包蒙吉。納婦吉。子克家。
Nine in the second place means: To bear with fools in kindliness brings good fortune. To know how to take women Brings good fortune. The son is capable of taking charge of the household.
Line 3
六三 勿用取女。見金夫。不有躬。无攸利。
Six in the third place means: Take not a maiden who, when she sees a man of bronze, Loses possession of herself. Nothing furthers.
Line 5
六五 童蒙。吉。
Six in the fifth place means: Childlike folly brings good fortune.
Line 6
上九 擊蒙。不利為寇。利禦寇。
Nine at the top means: In punishing folly It does not further one To commit transgressions. The only thing that furthers Is to prevent transgressions.
Trigram Changes
Yilin Verse
司錄憑怒，謀議無道。商民失政，殷人乏祀。
The Director of Records abuses his anger; counsel and deliberation lack the Way. The Shang people lose good governance; the Yin people’s sacrifices are abandoned.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
A spring beneath the mountain runs into bureaucratic cruelty. The Director of Records acts on anger, deliberation abandons principle. The Shang people lose their governance, the Yin folk forfeit their sacrifices — the ancestral rites that sustain a dynasty's connection to heaven are severed. When officials govern by rage rather than by law, the entire sacrificial order collapses. From Youthful Folly to Obstruction, the transformation compounds the crisis: water atop the mountain, impassable and cold. The naif confronts a system where power has been divorced from legitimacy. The Shang's fall serves as perpetual warning: when those who administer justice act without dao, the state does not merely decline — it loses its link to the sacred.
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