Jin to Lü: buying from a large company after two false starts

Date not recorded · A merchant from Kyushu · 中文版

The cast

Hexagram 35 Jìn (Progress), line 3 moving, changing to Hexagram 56 Lǚ (The Wanderer).

Original text

九州商人某來。請占購賣某大會社物品。成否如何。筮得晉之旅。爻辭曰。六三衆允。悔亡。斷曰。卦體下順上明。顯見以明白無欺。柔順得衆爲要。今占購賣物品。而得晉三爻。知其在初爻已欲購賣。爲人所摧折不成。二爻又欲賣之。爲己多愁慮未定。茲當三爻。已見衆心允洽。雖四爻爲貪人。意欲從中取利。然因大衆已允。亦不復阻止矣。准可購賣。无悔。

In plain words

A merchant from Kyushu came to ask whether a purchase of goods from a certain large company would go through. The cast gave Jin with its third line moving, changing into Lü. The line reads: "Six in the third place: all agree; regret vanishes."

Takashima's judgment: Jin has compliance below and brightness above, which shows that what matters is to be open and honest, and to win people over by being accommodating. Asking about this purchase and drawing the third line of Jin shows that at the first line you already wanted to buy, but were thwarted by others; at the second you wanted to go ahead again, but your own worries left it undecided.

Now, at the third line, everyone is of one mind. The fourth line is a greedy person who would like to take a cut in the middle, but since everyone has agreed, he can no longer stand in the way. The purchase can go ahead, with no regret.

How Takashima read it

Only one line text is read: with one moving line, the third line of Jin is read, but the neighbouring lines are laid out as a timeline.
The figure is compliance below and brightness above: Kun yielding, Li bright, read as doing business openly and accommodatingly.
The lines become a sequence: the first line's "advancing, but pushed back" is being thwarted; the second's "advancing, but sorrowful" is one's own worry; the third's "all agree" is consensus; the fourth's "advancing like a rat" is the greedy middleman. Takashima strings the line texts into a story.
"All agree; regret vanishes": once everyone has agreed, one person's obstruction counts for little.

About the outcome

The text does not say whether the deal went through. The story of being thwarted and then hesitating is inferred from the lines; the merchant would know whether it was true, but the book does not record his reply.

Applying it to your situation

"All agree; regret vanishes" suggests that once most of those involved are on board, a lone objection need not weigh too heavily. Whose agreement does your project really need, and are you spending too much energy on someone who cannot actually stop it?

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.

Cast a hexagram · All of Takashima's cases · The 64 hexagrams