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The Book Ends Before the Crossing Is Finished

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The Book Ends Before the Crossing Is Finished

The King Wen sequence ends on hexagram 64, Wei Ji, Before Completion or Not Yet Across, and that is one of the most deliberate-looking decisions in the entire text.

The obvious arrangement would put completion last. Instead completion is hexagram 63 and the book closes with the crossing unfinished: fire above water, every line in the wrong position by the commentarial scheme, and a judgement that promises success and then warns that the little fox, having nearly crossed, gets its tail wet, nothing furthers.

Whether this ordering carries an intention is not answerable from the text. The Mawangdui manuscript, recovered in 1973, arranges the hexagrams in a completely different order grouped by upper trigram, which means the received sequence is not the only ancient one and its ending may be less pointed than it looks. Whether the Mawangdui order is older than King Wen's, or a regional variant, is genuinely disputed among scholars and should not be stated either way.

What is uncontroversial is how the received sequence reads. It ends without arriving, and the tradition has consistently taken that as a statement: the process does not terminate, the situation after completion is another situation, and a book of changes that ended in a settled state would be contradicting itself.

The line texts are practical rather than philosophical, a wet tail, a braked carriage, a three-year campaign, drinking wine and getting one's head wet. Nothing in them announces that this is the end of anything, which is a further reason to be careful about how much intention the ordering is made to carry.

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