Li to Shi He: a marriage the reading advised against

Date not recorded · A friend of Takashima · 中文版

The cast

Hexagram 30 Lí (The Clinging Fire), line 3 moving, changing to Hexagram 21 Shì Kè (Biting Through).

Original text

友人某來曰。余將娶某女。請占吉凶。筮得離之噬嗑。爻辭曰。九三日昃之離。不鼓缶而歌。則大耋之嗟。凶。斷曰。爻辭曰日昃之離。離。離散也。日昃之離。謂婚後而復離也。鼓盆而歌者。憚亡也。不鼓而歌。非憚亡。必生離。大耋之嗟。是嘆其不得偕老也。此婚不成爲上。成則亦必離散。不吉之兆。後友人不信此占。媒娶成婚。未幾因家門不和。又復離散。果如所占云云。

In plain words

A friend of Takashima came and said: I am going to marry a certain young woman; please divine whether it will go well. The cast gave Li with its third line moving, changing into Shi He. The line reads: "Nine in the third place: in the light of the setting sun, if one does not beat the pot and sing, there will be the sighing of old age; misfortune."

Takashima's judgment: the line speaks of Li, and Li here means parting. "Li at sunset" means separating after the marriage. Beating a basin and singing is what one does at a death; singing without beating it is not a death, so it must be a parting of the living. "The sighing of old age" laments not growing old together.

It would be best if this marriage did not take place; if it does, it will surely end in separation. It is an unlucky sign.

The friend did not believe the reading and married through a go-between. Before long, over discord between the families, they separated, just as the reading said.

How Takashima read it

Only one line text is read: with one moving line, the third line of Li is read.
A word is taken in another sense: Li's own meaning is clinging, brightness, but Takashima takes its other sense, "parting", and reads the whole line as separation after marriage.
An old story helps draw the line: "beating the pot" is linked to Zhuangzi beating a basin and singing when his wife died, which lets Takashima tell parting by death from parting in life.
The line's place is sunset: the third line ends the lower trigram, like the sun past noon, a time of decline after the peak.

About the outcome

"Just as the reading said" is Takashima's own record; the text gives only "discord between the families" and nothing more. Cases where someone ignored the advice and things went wrong are exactly the kind divination books keep. This site does not treat it as evidence; what is worth reading is how the two senses of "Li" change the reading of the whole line.

Applying it to your situation

A marriage is between two people, and often between two families too; here the separation came from discord between the families. In an important relationship of yours, besides the two of you, which other relationships need looking after as well?

Original: Takashima Kaemon, Takashima Ekidan (expanded edition), recorded by Yanagida Ikusaku, Chinese text by Wang Zhiben, 1901. Translation, notes and reflection by this site.

These are historical records kept by the diviner himself. The outcomes are his own account; this site uses them to study how the lines were read, not as evidence that divination predicts events.

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