Takashima & the Yilin · A short read
His plans go nowhere. He finds someone else to work with.
A senior employee of Ōkura Kihachirō came to Takashima to ask about his prospects. The cast gave him horses that would not move on, followed by a marriage match. Takashima read the passage as a problem at work: the person above him would not take his advice.
A marriage in a business reading
The fourth line of Zhun, hexagram 3, says 乘馬班如，求婚媾，往吉，无不利. Horses hesitate; someone seeks a marriage alliance. Takashima took the alliance as a working partnership. The man wanted to get on with things and, in Takashima’s reading, needed someone willing to work with him.
He found two possible partners in the six-line figure. The fourth line sits beside the fifth, which he treated as the person in authority. It also corresponds to the first line, three places below. That gave him a second direction to look: if the nearby superior would not listen, seek help from the first line.
A shop beside the garrison
Takashima later heard that the employee had gone with a manager to Hiroshima to handle business for the garrison. They fell out. The employee left Ōkura, went to Osaka and opened a shop beside the garrison there. He hired a manager he knew from the same trade.
Takashima connected that new colleague with the first line. The account gives us the quarrel and the new shop through what he heard afterwards. It stops before telling us how the shop fared.
Return to the horses
A line about approaching a marriage partner has become a story about leaving a job and hiring a colleague. The connection runs through the need for another person’s cooperation. Takashima makes the leap explicit enough for us to follow it.
Read the fourth line beside the first and fifth. You can see the arrangement he used before deciding whether you would have made the same leap. Meanwhile the horses remain poised between standing still and setting out, a fitting image for the employee before the story has an ending.
Sources & translation
Takashima Ekidan, expanded edition (1901), 上經元, p. 58, Zhun, fourth line. The later events are what Takashima reports hearing. English introduction: DaYan.