比 → 解

Commentary

Water upon earth should nourish crops, but here someone plows bare stone on a mountaintop. Seeds are wasted, the household impoverished. Without viable ground, the work is futile — seedlings refuse to sprout. The image inverts farming's fundamental covenant: soil should receive seed and return harvest, but stone returns nothing. From Holding Together to Deliverance, thunder and rain should release tension and grant relief. Yet the verse offers no such liberation — only the stubborn pointlessness of cultivating rock. The transformation suggests that deliverance requires first abandoning what cannot be saved. One must descend the barren mountain before the rain of Jie can do any good.