艮 → 坤
Hexagram 52: Keeping Still Mountain → Hexagram 2: The Receptive
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 2 changing lines (lines 3, 6).
Line 3
九三 艮其限。列其夤。厲熏心。
Nine in the third place means: Keeping his hips still. Making his sacrum stiff. Dangerous. The heart suffocates.
Line 6
上九 敦艮吉。
Nine at the top means: Noblehearted keeping still. Good fortune.
Trigram Changes
Yilin Verse
穿匏挹水，篝銕燃火。勞疲力竭，飢渴為禍。
Scooping water with a hollowed gourd, kindling fire in an iron basket. Toil spent, strength exhausted; hunger and thirst become the calamity.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
Twin mountains stand still, yet here stillness collapses into exhaustion. One scoops water with a punctured gourd and lights a fire in a wire cage over iron — every tool is broken, every effort futile. Labor drains the body; hunger and thirst compound into real harm. The imagery is elemental subsistence pushed beyond endurance: containers that cannot hold, fuel that cannot sustain. From Keeping Still to the Receptive, doubled mountain yields to doubled earth. The mountain's restraint, taken to its extreme, becomes the earth's passive acceptance of suffering. Where stillness should have been strategic withdrawal, here it has frozen into helplessness, and the ground simply absorbs one blow after another without the strength to respond.
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