شش خطی 54
ازدواج خواهر کوچکتر، خدمتکار، زیردست (Guī Mèi)

Making a young girl marry means intercourse is not proper. In the qualities of the hexagram, above is thunder , movement, and below is lake joy: Inwardly delighted and outwardly moved, actively seeking enjoyment, behavior obeying emotion—this is like using a girl to seek a son; yin is first, yang comes after—the intercourse is not proper, so it is called making a young girl marry.

This is the hexagram of seeking the real within the false; it follows on the previous hexagram mountain. Mountain means stopping in the proper place, getting rid of incorrect enjoyment and improper action. Before the primordial in people is spoiled and mixes with acquired conditioning, yin and yang are united: Yang controls yin, yin follows yang, one energy flows, the living potential persists, wholly integrated with the design of heaven—they merge naturally, without depending on human effort. Then when acquired conditioning takes over one's actions, the primal true yang is lost outside, discriminatory awareness uses consciousness to produce illusions, yin and yang go awry, the elemental energies get mixed up, desires stir and emotions arise, the mind gets mixed up with things—delighting in externals from within, inwardly moved by externals, one's inherent true yang is evaporated by other.

Self is represented by the east, in the province of thunder ; other is represented by the west, in the province of lake . The east is the host, essence; the west is the guest, feeling. Lake seeking thunder is disturbing essence by emotion, external energy injuring inner energy.

Furthermore, lake is associated with metal, governing punishment and killing; thunder is associated with wood, governing life and merit. When punishment and killing overcome life and merit, positive energy dissipates day by day, and negative energy grows day by day. When this dissipation and growth reaches the point where there is pure negativity and no positivity, even if you want to avoid dying you cannot. Therefore if a young girl is made to marry, “to go on will lead to misfortune; no profit is gained.”

So making a young girl marry means using lake to seek thunder, or using emotion to seek essence—even if they interact, it is not right. Sages have a way to restore the primal while in the temporal: If one seeks lake with thunder, using essence to seek feeling, not only will one not be overcome by emotion, one will also be able to snatch the true yang within feeling and restore it to essence. When feeling returns to essence, punishment turns into merit; essence loves the righteousness of feeling, feeling loves the goodness of essence. Essence and feeling united, there is a return to correctness: Reverting to the original, going back to the fundamental, the spiritual embryo solidifies, and even when meeting misfortune it turns to fortune. Then there will be unfailing benefit where before there was none. This is an attempt to explain correctness in the midst of incorrectness.

Making a young girl marry means that intercourse is not proper. Above is thunder , below is lake ; there is thunder above a lake. Thunder stands for agitation, movement; lake stands for calm, stillness: Thunder agitating a lake, movement disturbing the stillness, the water of the lake overflows, the intercourse of yin and yang is not proper. This is the image of making a young girl marry.

What superior people see in this is that there are true and false yin and yang, there is right and wrong practice; the intercourse of true yin and yang comes about naturally, and thus can endure, while the intercourse of false yin and yang comes about through forced effort, and hence ultimately cannot last long. Therefore superior people want to persist to the end, yet first should know what is wrong.

Persisting to the end means to persist to the end of eternity. To know what is wrong means to know the degeneracy of what is incorrect. The Tradition of Connected Sayings of the I Ching says, "By finding out truth and fulfilling one's nature, one arrives at the meaning of life." The Tao of nature and life is all a matter of determining right and wrong by finding out truth. Finding out truth means finding out the principle of communion of yin and yang.

The dividing line between the primordial and the conditioned is but a hairbreadth; on one side is the primordial, on the other side is the conditioned. Conditioned yin and yang always interact, but their intercourse is not correct; it has no conclusion, and goes wrong. For example, there are ignorant people in the world who join the energies of heart and genitals, or join the active and passive energy channels up and down the back and front of the body, or cause energy to rise up the spine at midnight and descend down the front of the body at noon, or gather energy from sexual intercourse, or heat lead and mercury together, or regulate their exhalations and inhalations—all of these are recognizing the artificial as real, and trying to force communion; imagining that they will thereby live long, instead they are hastening death. This is quite wrong, a serious degeneration. If practitioners of the Tao want to persist to the end, they should first know what is wrong; if they know what is wrong, they will not be deluded by the depraved words of false teachings. Then if they seek to persist to the end, there is hope they will be closer.