Bi to Jian: choosing a business partner

Date not recorded · A friend of Takashima · 中文版

The cast

Hexagram 8 Bǐ (Holding Together), line 3 moving, changing to Hexagram 39 Jiǎn (Obstruction).

Original text

友人某來告曰。僕近與友某相謀。興一大商業。請占其成否。筮得比之蹇。爻辭曰。六三比之匪人。斷曰。比者。地上有水。有往來親洽之意也。然依其所親。其中顯分利害。與善人親則吉。與不善人親則凶。此爻曰匪人。顯見匪善人也。今足下共謀之友。余却不知其人。就爻辭而論。三與上爻既相應。三之所云匪人。即上爻所云无首。人而无首。恐難免禍。足下與之。共企商業。凶莫甚焉。謂之比之匪人。故象傳曰。不亦傷乎。友人聞而大驚。未幾而西國亂起。此友果處重罪云。

In plain words

A friend of Takashima came and said: I have recently been planning, with another friend, to start a large business together; please divine whether it will succeed. The cast gave Bi with its third line moving, changing into Jian. The line reads: "Six in the third place: joining with the wrong people."

Takashima's judgment: Bi is water on the earth, meaning closeness and coming together. But it depends on whom you draw close to, and the difference is stark: close to good people, fortune is good; close to bad people, it is bad. This line says "the wrong people", plainly not good ones. I do not know your partner; but going by the line, the third line corresponds with the top line, and the "wrong people" of the third line are the "without a head" of the top line. A person without a head can hardly escape disaster. Going into business with him would be as bad as it gets; that is "joining with the wrong people", and so the commentary says, "Is that not harmful?"

The friend was shocked. Not long after, an uprising broke out in the west of the country, and the partner was indeed sentenced for a serious crime.

How Takashima read it

Only one line text is read: with one moving line, the third line of Bi is read.
The hexagram is read as closeness: water on the earth, the two clinging together; whether Bi is good depends on whom one draws close to.
The line's correspondence is used: the third line answers the top line, so Takashima carries the top line's "joining without a head" over to the third and concludes that the partner is "without a head", that is, will come to a bad end.
Takashima says openly that he does not know the partner; the judgment comes wholly from the line, closed with the Small Image commentary's "Is that not harmful?"

About the outcome

That the partner "was indeed sentenced" is Takashima's record after the fact; the text does not say what the crime was or how it related to the uprising. Matching a line to a particular event afterwards does not show that divination works. What is worth reading is how correspondence carries the meaning of the top line down to the third.

Applying it to your situation

"Joining with the wrong people" asks what kind of person you are drawing close to. When choosing someone to work with, do you weigh what they can bring, or how they go about things? If you do not know them well enough yet, get to know them better before going into business together.

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