Wei Ji to Kui: taking over a business that failed before

Date not recorded · A friend of Takashima who had taken over a manufacturing business · 中文版

The cast

Hexagram 64 Wèi Jì (Before Completion), line 1 moving, changing to Hexagram 38 Kuí (Opposition).

Original text

友人某來。請占製造物品。生業如何。筮得未濟之睽。爻辭曰。初六濡其尾。吝。斷曰。初居未濟之初。正在濟未將濟之時。既濟之終濡其首。未濟之始濡其尾。有首尾不相顧之象。今君占製造生業。得此爻辭。知此業必是舊業。君接其後而重興也。君乃不知前車之覆。貿然而蹈其後。以致製品所出。一時不能銷售。以此質金。反致失利。得失不償。進退兩難。幾同小狐汔濟。而濡其尾也。未免吝矣。至二爻曰。曳其輪。貞吉。在明年當以車運出外。可以販賣獲利也。君可無憂焉。

In plain words

A friend of Takashima came to ask how his manufacturing business would fare. The cast gave Wei Ji with its first line moving, changing into Kui. The line reads: "Six at the beginning: it gets its tail wet; shame."

Takashima's judgment: the first line is at the start of Before Completion, the moment when one is about to cross but has not yet. The end of After Completion is "getting the head wet" and the start of Before Completion "getting the tail wet", an image of head and tail not looking after each other. Asking about a manufacturing business and drawing this line shows that it must be an old business which you have taken over and revived.

But you did not heed how the earlier one came to grief, and walked blindly in its tracks, so the goods you make cannot be sold for now; pledging them to borrow money has only lost you more, the gains do not cover the losses, and you can go neither forward nor back. It is almost like the little fox that, nearly across, gets its tail wet. Some regret is unavoidable.

But the second line says "dragging the wheels back; steadfast, good fortune": next year you should ship the goods by cart to other places and sell them there, and you will profit. There is no need to worry.

How Takashima read it

Only one line text is read: with one moving line, the first line of Wei Ji is read, with the second line used to look ahead to next year.
Head and tail in the sequence: After Completion ends with "getting the head wet" and Before Completion begins with "getting the tail wet", head joined to tail, read as a business taken over from someone before. The relation between two adjacent hexagrams is used to read the moving line.
The judgment's "the little fox, nearly across, gets its tail wet" becomes repeating the predecessor's mistake and getting stuck.
The second line's "dragging the wheels" becomes carts: shipping the goods out next year to sell elsewhere.

About the outcome

The text does not say whether the business picked up the following year. "It must be an old business" is Takashima's inference from the order of the hexagrams; the friend, of course, knew whether it was.

Applying it to your situation

The Changes ends with Before Completion: nothing is ever fully across. When taking over something that failed before, the first task is to understand why it failed. In what you are taking on or starting again, where did the earlier attempt come to grief?

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