節 → 屯
Hexagram 60: Limitation → Hexagram 3: Difficulty at the Beginning
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 1 changing line (line 2).
Line 2
九二 不出門庭。凶。
Nine in the second place means: Not going out of the gate and the courtyard Brings misfortune.
Trigram Changes
Yilin Verse
日望一食，常恐不足，祿命寡薄。
Each day hoping for a single meal, ever fearing it will not suffice; fate and fortune are thin indeed.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
Water over lake rations what flows through, and this verse embodies that scarcity. Each day yields barely a single meal; hunger is constant, fortune thin. The image is of a life pared to the bone — not catastrophe but chronic insufficiency, where every sunrise brings the same anxious arithmetic of survival. From Limitation to Difficulty at the Beginning, the transformation deepens the constriction: clouds and thunder churn but cannot yet release rain. What was measured restraint in the source hexagram becomes the painful stalling of new life in the target. Scant provisions meet blocked beginnings. Yet Difficulty at the Beginning implies that germination, however painful, is underway — the sprout strains against frozen ground, and even meager rations sustain the struggle to emerge.
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