Youthful Folly, Line 4

The fourth line describes the hexagram's most isolated position. Legge gives the subject bound in chains of ignorance, with occasion for regret. Unlike the earlier lines, which show ignorance being actively corrected, tolerated, or warned against, this line shows ignorance left entirely alone, with no teacher nearby to offer either firmness or patience, and the result is confinement rather than growth.

This line opens the upper trigram Gen, mountain and stillness, and its position at the foot of that trigram marks a place cut off from the lower trigram's instructive activity, water no longer reaching the ground it once watered. Chinese commentary reads the chains here not as punishment imposed from outside but as the natural consequence of isolation: folly given no correction and no company does not resolve itself, it hardens into something more fixed and harder to loosen.

The line's counsel, read through commentary tradition, is a warning about the danger of leaving any pupil, or any untaught impulse, entirely without guidance. Where the first line showed correction and the second showed patience, the fourth line shows what happens in their absence: not a dramatic failure but a quiet stagnation, regret arising simply from time passing with nothing done to answer the ignorance the line began with.

Six in the fourth place is read divinatorially as a warning against isolation left unaddressed. A querent whose reading lands here may be facing a period cut off from guidance, mentorship, or correction, and the line's image, chains of ignorance with occasion for regret, describes not active punishment but simple stagnation: a difficulty that does not resolve on its own because nothing and no one is present to help resolve it.

Opening the upper trigram Gen, mountain and stillness, this line's position marks a place distanced from the lower trigram's instructive activity, and a reading landing here often signals that the querent has drifted from whatever teacher, community, or structure once offered correction, whether through circumstance or through the mountain's own stillness settling in. The regret named is not sudden but accumulated, the cost of time passing without anything active being done to answer it.

Traditional divinatory counsel reads this line as a call to seek out guidance rather than wait for the isolation to lift on its own. The chains described are real but not permanent; commentary tradition treats them as the direct consequence of a solvable absence, and the querent is advised that reconnecting with a source of instruction, formal or informal, is the specific remedy the line implies even though it does not state it outright.