Repair

Accumulated neglect, now visible.

The situation

Something rotted quietly while attention was elsewhere. Cosmetic fixes will fail.

What it asks of you

Go to the root and rebuild. Plan before, review after.

Where it leads

The six lines

1. initial Setting right what the father let rot. There is a son, so the dead father is not blamed. Dangerous; it ends well. 幹父之蠱，有子，考无咎，厲終吉
2. second Setting right what the mother let rot. Don't be rigid about this one. 幹母之蠱，不可貞
3. third Setting right what the father let rot. A little regret, nothing serious. 幹父之蠱，小有悔，无大咎
4. fourth Being easy on what the father let rot. Go on like that and it humiliates. 裕父之蠱，往見吝
5. fifth Setting right what the father let rot, and being praised for it. 幹父之蠱，用譽
6. top Not serving kings or princes. Setting his own work higher. 不事王侯，高尚其事

The line texts are the oldest layer of the book. They are pictures, not instructions, and they are meant to be held against your own situation rather than decoded.

How this one is built

Written out as six lines, bottom to top, this pattern is 100110 — a solid line is 1, a broken line is 0. Every relationship above is arithmetic on those six digits, not interpretation: reverse the order and you get the other side, flip every digit and you get the opposite reading, take the middle four and you get what sits underneath. Anyone can check the result, which is what separates a structure from a fortune.

The sequence is built the same way. The sixty-four are arranged in thirty-two pairs, and turned upside down it becomes Following. The rule holds for all thirty-two pairs without exception — twenty-eight joined by reversal, four by inversion.

In the received order it sits between Following and Approach. The order is not alphabetical or random: the old commentary reads it as a chain, one situation giving rise to the next.