63 story

The image of hexagram 63
Jí Jì, already crossing

Hexagram 63 has trigram Lí, Fire, below or inside and Kăn, Water, above or outside. Lí is order and clarity and insight, but it is never easy to keep things in order towards the outside. With Kăn there, they never get stable, entropy is still around.

What does it mean, 'inner' and 'outer trigram' (popup)

When trigram Lí is below (popup)

When trigram Kăn is above (popup)

Lí below Kăn: Lí and Kăn need each other, or the world will collapse. Never trust it when something is right and fine and totally solved. Enjoy it as long as it lasts, but never stop watching for decay. Left alone, it will fall apart after a while, it needs upkeeping to stay the way it is. Water runs down, if you let it, the fire will extinguish. You have to detect dangers, to repair and defend what you built, renew what grows obsolete. All of that just to keep what you have.

The old diviners gave this combination of trigrams a name: Jí Jì. Crossing a river used to be dangerous and a great accomplisment. But the other shore may not be safe, the journey not yet finished, so stay alert.

Ideogram of the hexagram name: Jí, the first (upper) character, is a belching person turning away from a pot of food: 'eaten up', the action is finished: already, don't blame, fact, set, and, both, total solar or lunar eclipse, completed, finished, adulthood.
The second Lì or lower character is a river and 'level', many plants all at the same height. A level place in a river, a crossing place. The two Ji have a different sound, one goes up, the other goes down.

The 'Great Image' says:

Hex.63 is the contrast of 64, where nothing 'is', where nothing has been defined yet.
Hex.63 is crossing a threshold between what was and what is.

  Story:
  Nature knows nothing about fixed order like man does. ‘Everything in its place and stay there’ as if he is training his dog. Nature knows equilibrium, an organic interplay of all creatures, things, climates, everything. When one thing changes, everything moves toward a new balance. People who have a mind like nature are healthy, happy and good. When they are disturbed, their mind moves toward a new natural wholeness. They are not rigidly organized inside, they have an inner symbiosis of all aspects of their personality. It is a mind of Chan, of Zen.
   Chaos and order alternate. You need both, you need chaos to take apart the old and obsolete, and to give new patterns and forms the opportunity to emerge. You need order to turn them into reality. Hex.63 is order – for as long as it endures. Neverending order would be dangerous, things would freeze or petrify. After order always comes chaos. “In the beginning good fortune, at the end chaos”. Order can only exist “now”, it has no future, certainly not a fixed one.
   The lost curtain of the second line has to do with fixed order, how things "should be". When the world is as it "should be", small deviations can feel like big disasters. In an old YiJing there is a verse for hex.63 about a spiders web - "throw it in the ditch". A spiders web is a perfect piece of art, but tiny things can destroy it completely.

The image of hexagram 63 Jí Jì, already crossing

The image of hexagram 63
Jí Jì, already crossing