旅 → 小畜
Hexagram 56: The Wanderer → Hexagram 9: Small Taming
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 2 changing lines (lines 2, 5).
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 5
六五 射雉。一矢亡。終以譽命。
Six in the fifth place means: He shoots a pheasant. It drops with the first arrow. In the end this brings both praise and office.
Trigram Changes
Yilin Verse
鳴雞无距，與鵲格鬭。翅折目盲，為仇所傷。
A crowing cock without spurs fights and grapples with a magpie. Its wing is broken, its eye blinded; wounded by its foe.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
Fire on the mountain, and a rooster without spurs picks a fight with a magpie. Wings broken and eyes blinded, the combatant is destroyed by the very enemy it provoked. The rooster enters battle lacking its natural weapon — the sharp spur that makes a fighting cock formidable — and challenges a bird outside its class. This is the wanderer who overestimates his position in unfamiliar territory. From The Wanderer to Small Taming, wind blows gently above heaven: a force of restraint and refinement, not brute combat. The verse warns that attempting to fight when one lacks the proper equipment, in a contest one was never suited for, leads not to small accumulation of virtue but to self-inflicted ruin.
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