蒙 → 訟
Hexagram 4: Youthful Folly → Hexagram 6: Conflict
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 2 changing lines (lines 4, 5).
Line 4
六四 困蒙。吝。
Six in the fourth place means: Entangled folly bring humiliation.
Line 5
六五 童蒙。吉。
Six in the fifth place means: Childlike folly brings good fortune.
Trigram Changes
Yilin Verse
老楊日衰，條多枯枝。爵級不進。遂下摧隤。
The old poplar daily withers; its branches grow many dead twigs. Rank and office do not advance; tumbling downward into ruin.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
A spring beneath the mountain runs dry as an aging willow declines. The old poplar weakens day by day, its branches growing more barren and brittle. Rank and title advance no further; instead, everything crumbles downward. The imagery is purely natural — organic decay without remedy. No promotion arrives to reverse the slide; the tree simply hollows from within. From Youthful Folly to Conflict, the transformation exposes what happens when naive ambition meets an indifferent system: heaven and water move in contrary directions, and the petitioner's case finds no hearing. The spring that once promised growth now feeds a dying tree, its energy wasted in a contest it cannot win.
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