小過 → 損
Hexagram 62: Small Exceeding → Hexagram 41: Decrease
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 1 changing line (line 2).
Line 2
六二 過其祖。遇其妣。不及其君。遇其臣。无咎。
Six in the second place means: She passes by her ancestor And meets her ancestress. He does not reach his prince And meets the official. No blame.
Trigram Changes
Yilin Verse
昧昧暗暗，不知白黑。風雨亂擾，光明伏匿，幽王失國。
Dark upon dark, dim upon dim; black and white cannot be known; wind and rain throw all into disorder; light and brightness lie hidden; King You loses his kingdom.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
Thunder rumbles above the mountain, but all is murky and dim — one cannot distinguish white from black. Wind and rain churn in confusion, and brightness hides itself away. King You of Zhou loses his kingdom. King You (幽王), the last effective Western Zhou ruler, lit the beacon fires to amuse his concubine Bao Si, crying wolf until the lords refused to answer when real danger arrived. The Quanrong invaded, and the dynasty fell at Mount Li in 771 BC. His reign epitomizes the erasure of moral clarity: when the ruler cannot tell light from dark, the entire realm follows into blindness. From Small Exceeding to Decrease, the mountain's thunder subsides into a lake at the mountain's base — resources draining downward, strength ebbing away.
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