Gen to Gu: whether to halt a mine

Date not recorded · Ishizaka, a friend of Takashima with a mining venture · 中文版

The cast

Hexagram 52 Gèn (Keeping Still), line 2 moving, changing to Hexagram 18 Gǔ (Repairing the Spoiled).

Original text

應友人石坂氏之請。爲占鑛山事。筮得艮之蠱。爻辭曰。六二艮其腓。不拯其隨。其心不快。斷曰。艮爲山。腓在山足之上。彖傳曰。艮其背。背身後也。爻之取象。皆在背後。爲占鑛山。而得此爻。知鑛山之穴。宜在山背。初爲趾。二爲腓。腓上於趾。知其穴又在股之下。足之上也。艮。止也。論其事。謂停止。在趾與腓。本喜動。不喜止。曰止。其心必爲之不快矣。今必倡始。議將停止。隨從者亦無力拯救。固宜作退步爲是。必待五爻悔亡。得其輔助。可復興也。以爻計之。當在三年之後。

In plain words

At the request of his friend Ishizaka, Takashima cast about a mining matter. The cast gave Gen with its second line moving, changing into Gu. The line reads: "Six in the second place: keeping the calves still; he cannot help the one he follows; his heart is not glad."

Takashima's judgment: Gen is the mountain, and the calf is above the foot of the mountain. The commentary says "keeping the back still", the back being behind the body; all the lines of Gen take their images from the back. Drawing this line when asking about a mine shows that the ore should be at the back of the mountain. The first line is the toes and the second the calf, above the toes, so the seam lies below the thigh and above the foot, low on the slope.

Gen means stopping; in terms of the business, a halt. Toes and calves like to move and dislike keeping still, so being told to stop, the heart is bound to be unhappy. Someone must now be pushing for work to stop, and those who go along cannot rescue it. It is best to step back. Only when the fifth line is reached, "regret vanishes", and help arrives can it be revived. Counting by lines, that will be about three years from now.

How Takashima read it

Only one line text is read: with one moving line, the second line of Gen is read.
The body is mapped onto the mountain: the lines of Gen run from toes and calves to waist, trunk and cheeks, and Takashima maps them straight onto the mountain, placing the seam at the back and low down. The figure is used almost as a map.
The hexagram is read as stopping, that is, halting the works; "his heart is not glad" becomes a halt that goes against what people want.
Time is counted by lines: from the second to the fifth gives help and revival in about three years.

About the outcome

The text does not say whether the mine was halted or revived three years later, and the position of the seam was never confirmed. Placing ore from "the calf" is Takashima at his most concrete, and least checkable.

Applying it to your situation

"Keeping the calves still; his heart is not glad": being forced to stop when you want to move is hard. For something you have had to pause, should you push on regardless, or step back and return when help is at hand?

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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