艮 → 小過
Hexagram 52: Keeping Still Mountain → Hexagram 62: Small Exceeding
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 2 changing lines (lines 4, 6).
Line 4
六四 艮其身。无咎。
Six in the fourth place means: Keeping his trunk still. No blame.
Line 6
上九 敦艮吉。
Nine at the top means: Noblehearted keeping still. Good fortune.
Trigram Changes
Yilin Verse
出門逢患，與禍為怨。更相擊刺，傷我指端。
Stepping out the gate, meeting calamity; becoming enemies with disaster. Striking and stabbing one another, wounding the tips of my fingers.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
Twin mountains stand still, but stepping outside the door one encounters trouble immediately. Colliding with misfortune, hostility erupts on all sides. Blows are traded and blades cross, wounding the fingertips. The verse compresses violence into the smallest possible space: the moment of crossing the threshold, the instant of contact, the injury to the extremity. From Keeping Still to Small Exceeding, mountain yields to thunder above the mountain — the small bird that flies too high and falls. Small Exceeding counsels: exceed in reverence, in frugality, in grief, but never in ambition. The verse's figure exceeds the mountain's boundary by a single step and pays for it at the fingertips. The smallest transgression of stillness triggers disproportionate harm.
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