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Being at the End of One's Resources

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Being at the End of One's Resources

Hexagram 47 describes depletion, and its distinctive contribution is that it separates being exhausted from being wrong.

The judgement insists on success and on blamelessness while the line texts describe humiliation, confinement and punishment. That combination is unusual and it is the reading. The situation is genuinely bad, the querent's resources are genuinely spent, and none of that is presented as a verdict on their conduct. Traditional commentary connects the figure to the person of integrity in a period that has no use for them.

The most practically useful line is the one about not being believed. A great many consultations that produce this hexagram involve a querent who is telling the truth to people who are not receiving it, and the text's counsel is not to argue harder. Persuasion is not available in this condition. What is available, in the traditional reading, is holding the position without spending further energy defending it.

The figure's water trigram sits below a lake, which the Image reads as a lake with no water in it, drained, exposed, its bed showing. That is an unusually exact picture of the state, and it is one of the places where the commentarial trigram system earns its keep.

Readers should be careful not to soften this hexagram. It is one of the few in the book that describes a bad period with no immediate turn in it, and the honest reading says so rather than hunting the line texts for a consolation they do not contain. What the hexagram offers instead is the assurance that the depletion is not a judgement, which for most querents in this condition is the more useful thing to hear.

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