中孚 → 夬
Hexagram 61: Inner Truth → Hexagram 43: Breakthrough
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 3 changing lines (lines 3, 4, 6).
Line 3
六三 得敵。或鼓或罷。或泣或歌。
Six in the third place means: He finds a comrade. Now he beats the drum, now he stops. Now he sobs, now he sings.
Line 4
六四 月幾望。馬匹亡。无咎。
Six in the fourth place means: The moon nearly at the full. The team horse goes astray. No blame.
Line 6
上九 翰音登于天。貞凶。
Nine at the top means: Cockcrow penetrating to heaven. Perseverance brings misfortune.
Trigram Changes
Yilin Verse
破亡之國，天所不福，難以止息。
The palace is ash, the pillars charcoal. The city gate has collapsed, weeds grow deep. Crows circle but will not land — even ghosts and spirits shun this cursed ground.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
Wind stirs above the lake, but the original verse simply declares: a ruined state forsaken by heaven, its troubles impossible to quell. This is the starkest of oracular verdicts — total, terminal, without appeal. Heaven's withdrawal of favor (天所不福) in Han cosmology meant not just political collapse but cosmic abandonment. From Inner Truth to Breakthrough, sincerity confronts the lake rising above heaven, the image of decisive resolution pushing upward. Yet the verse reads Breakthrough as destruction rather than liberation: what breaks through here is the accumulated rot of a doomed polity. When inner truth reveals that the core is already dead, the breakthrough moment is not triumph but the final collapse of a structure that should have fallen long ago.
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