After Completion

Hexagram 63 has a property the commentarial tradition makes a great deal of: it is the only figure in which every line occupies its correct position. In the system worked out in the Ten Wings, odd-numbered places are proper to unbroken lines and even-numbered places to broken ones. In this hexagram, and in no other, all six agree.

That system of correct and incorrect placement is not in the oldest layer. It is a commentarial apparatus, developed centuries after the Zhou Yi's core, and it is worth saying so because the observation about hexagram 63 is so often presented as a fact about the ancient text rather than about the tradition of reading it.

Within that tradition, though, the observation does real work. The hexagram is named Ji Ji, After Completion or Already Across, the river crossed, the task done, everything settled. And the judgement immediately undercuts it: success in small matters, perseverance furthers, and at the beginning good fortune, at the end disorder.

That is the hexagram's argument. A state of perfect order has nowhere to go except out of order, and the completion is therefore also the beginning of the decline. The Image counsels taking thought of misfortune and arming against it in advance, which is one of the book's most straightforwardly practical instructions.

The name is worth taking literally. Ji Ji is most plainly rendered as already across, the river behind you. That is not an abstraction about attainment; it is the ordinary language of a journey, and the hexagram's warning is the warning of somebody who has watched people relax on the far bank.

In reading practice hexagram 63 describes a hard-won completion, and its counsel is almost entirely about vigilance rather than celebration.

The line texts are correspondingly wary. A carriage brakes its wheels and a fox gets its tail wet. A woman loses the curtain of her carriage and is told not to seek it, since it will return in seven days. Someone takes a country after three years of campaigning, and inferior people should not be employed. Fine clothes turn to rags, and one should be on guard all day. A neighbour's small offering is more acceptable than one's own large sacrifice. The top line has the head in the water: danger.

A hexagram named After Completion whose last line is a person up to the neck in a river is not offering reassurance. The whole figure is about the interval during which a completed thing begins to come apart, and about doing the unglamorous maintenance that postpones it.

The fifth line is worth singling out. The neighbour's small and sincere offering being preferred to one's own large one is a comment on the relation between scale and value that recurs throughout the book, and it is the kind of remark that makes the Zhou Yi feel less like an oracle than like a sceptical observer of ritual life.

Its counterpart, hexagram 64, is its exact inversion and completes the sequence, with the crossing unfinished.

For a reading, the most useful thing this figure does is separate two questions a querent tends to run together: whether the thing is done, and whether it is safe. The hexagram's answer is that it is done, and that being done is not the same as being secure.