艮 → 訟
Hexagram 52: Keeping Still Mountain → Hexagram 6: Conflict
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 4 changing lines (lines 2, 3, 4, 5).
Line 2
六二 艮其腓。不拯其隨。其心不快。
Six in the second place means: Keeping his calves still. He cannot rescue him whom he follows. His heart is not glad.
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 4
六四 艮其身。无咎。
Six in the fourth place means: Keeping his trunk still. No blame.
Line 5
六五 艮其輔。言有序。悔亡。
Six in the fifth place means: Keeping his jaws still. The words have order. Remorse disappears.
Trigram Changes
Yilin Verse
元后貪欲，窮極民力。執政乖互，為夷所偪。
The sovereign, greedy with desire, exhausts the people's strength. Those in power conflict and oppose one another; pressed hard by the barbarians.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
Twin mountains stand still, but the sovereign himself has become the problem. The ruler is consumed by greed, draining the people's strength to its limit. Those who govern pull in opposite directions; the state is pressed by foreign enemies. The verse diagnoses a political crisis from the top: when the head of state is rapacious, administration becomes incoherent, and barbarian pressure exploits the resulting weakness. From Keeping Still to Conflict, doubled mountain gives way to heaven moving against water. Conflict arises when above and below diverge. The mountain's stillness, which should have been contemplative restraint, has become a tyrant's immovability — deaf to counsel, blind to collapse, while heaven and water race in opposing directions below him.
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