革 → 泰

Commentary

Fire within the lake yields to earth above heaven — the communion of Peace. Yet the verse inverts this promise. Nets are spread in all four directions; birds have nowhere to fly. Campaigns of conquest exhaust everything; the starving and impoverished cannot eat. Revolution should yield renewal, and Peace should mean heaven and earth in harmonious exchange. Instead, the old regime's final act is total encirclement: every escape blocked, every resource consumed by war. From Revolution to Peace, the bitter irony is that the transition to cosmic harmony must first pass through the darkest hour, when the collapsing order squeezes out its last measure of oppression before finally breaking apart.