旅 → 蒙
Hexagram 56: The Wanderer → Hexagram 4: Youthful Folly
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 3 changing lines (lines 1, 2, 3).
Line 1
初六 旅瑣瑣。斯其所取災。
Six at the beginning means: If the wanderer busies himself with trivial things, He draws down misfortune upon himself.
Line 2
六二 旅即次。懷其資。得童僕貞。
Six in the second place means: The wanderer comes to an inn. He has his property with him. He wins the steadfastness of a young servant.
Line 3
九三 旅焚其次。喪其童僕。貞厲。
Nine in the third place means: The wanderer's inn burns down. He loses the steadfastness of his young servant. Danger.
Trigram Changes
Yilin Verse
封豕溝瀆，灌潰國邑。火宿口中，民多疾病。
The great boar breaches the ditch; floods overwhelm the city. Fire lodges in its maw; the people suffer plague and sickness.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
Fire on the mountain blazes down upon a land ravaged by flood and pestilence. The 'great boar in the ditches' evokes the classical idiom of the monstrous swine that devastates waterways — a figure for rapacious, uncontrolled power bursting through dikes to inundate towns and fields. The Fire Star lodging in the mouth suggests a baleful conjunction: the star Antares (Heart, or Fire Star) positioned ominously, bringing plague upon the people. From The Wanderer to Youthful Folly, the fire that once lit the traveler's path descends into the spring beneath the mountain, where water runs dark and unclear. Folly here is not innocent ignorance but the bewilderment of a population overwhelmed by simultaneous disasters — flood, fire, and disease converging.
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