So far, I’ve introduced the idea of ever-flowing constancy, and explored six places where the Yi advises it. There is just one more example:
Don’t! 62.4
‘No mistake.
Not going past, meeting it.
Going on is dangerous, must be on guard.
Do not use ever-flowing constancy.’
This is clear enough: do not use ever-flowing constancy.
Why not?
Because going on is dangerous, and you need to be on guard. That word, ‘on guard’, jie 戒, originally shows two hands holding a dagger-axe. It contrasts with the character I translated as ‘defends’ in the previous line, 62.3, which literally means an earth embankment. So the point of being ‘on guard’ is that you can move: turn around to face any threat, change direction when you need to.
When you use ever-flowing constancy, you always refer back to your own inner knowing as your guide, and then you are effectively inoculated against outside influence. But the small bird needs always to be aware of everything around it, always alert and ready to react.
The priority now is not to find a way through for your idea, but to stay in one piece. You need to keep checking in with your surroundings, not your inner knowing. (The line changes to Hexagram 15, which ‘takes itself lightly’ and isn’t likely to imagine that its own inner truth – or principles, or sense of identity – is the most important factor.)
In practice, this line tends to mean things – and probably people – are changing, so maybe you need to do the same. Water, of course, never changes its nature and never stops flowing downhill. But then water also can’t be injured by anything it encounters along the way.
(Here’s an entertaining example of just how alert and responsive this line might be.)
Coda
As always, when I’m looking at all the occurrences of a single phrase, I go on a hunt for patterns. And to start with, I found a great many non-patterns.
Does the wateriness of the character come through? Well, Hexagram 8 is full of water imagery in both its trigrams and the myth of Yu the Great and the floods. Then 22.3 has watery text, and the trigram dui, lake, shows up a couple of times. But 2.7 and 52.1 are quite dry. (Unless you read the Mawangdui manuscript, where apparently the name of Hexagram 2 is written as chuan, ‘river’.)
I briefly thought there might be some story-telling with the trigram changes. At 22.3, fire changes to thunder. Then at 42.2, thunder to lake, and at 45.5, lake to thunder. Only then 52.1 changes mountain to fire, and of course 2.7 changed earth to heaven. Nothing to hang your hat on there.
Similarly with the zhi gua of (new hexagram created by) each change. Yes, 2.7, 22.3 and 42.2 all change to rotationally symmetrical hexagrams (1, 27, 61) – but then 45.5 and 52.1 don’t. (52.1 changes back to 22, where we’ve been before.)
The only pattern I can point to – without at all knowing what to make of it – is in the arrangement of the text for the six lines where ever-flowing constancy is a good idea.
There are three phrases it occurs in: ‘ever-flowing constancy bears fruit’, ‘from the source, ever-flowing constancy’, and ‘ever-flowing constancy is good fortune’. And here’s how these three are arranged across the six instances:
- 2.7: bears fruit
- 8.0: source
- 22.3 good fortune
- 42.2 good fortune
- 45.5 source
- 52.1: bears fruit
As you can see, there’s a mirror between 22.3 and 42.2: fruitful-source-good fortune: good fortune-source-fruitful. So those six lines make a pattern with rotational symmetry, just like the zhi gua created by the changes of 2.7, 22.3 and 42.2 (1, 27 and 61). (Only not of 45.5 or 52.1, of course…).
And then the one line where this is not a good idea is itself in a hexagram with rotational symmetry, 62, so that this line change destroys the symmetry instead of creating it. Also, where 27 and 61 have yang lines on the outside containing yin lines, 62 is the opposite.
And no, I have no idea what this pattern might mean.