The Book of Changes · Gui Mei

Hexagram 54: The Marrying Maiden

Thunder (the storm arriving) over Lake (still water held in a hollow)

Entering a relationship from the weaker position and without a settled place in it. The tradition is unusually blunt here: undertakings bring misfortune, and the counsel is to understand the arrangement rather than to improve it.

The image

Thunder over the lake. The reading is that a person understands the transitory in the light of the eternity of the end.

Thunder, above

Shock, beginning, and movement that starts below.

Lake, below

Openness, pleasure, and what is said out loud.

The six lines

Read from the bottom up.

1. Line 1Coming in at the lowest rank, and able to move anyway. Undertakings work from here.
2. Line 2Half sighted and still seeing. The constancy of someone doing it alone.
3. Line 3Coming in with no standing at all, and taking what is offered. The bottom of the arrangement.
4. Line 4The time is drawn out. What comes late comes in its own season.
5. Line 5The plainer garment is the one with rank inside it. The moon nearly full: enough, and not overfull.
6. Line 6The basket with no fruit, the blade with no blood. The form of the thing performed and nothing in it.

The same figure in Human Design

Human Design took its sixty four gates from this book, in this numbering, so hexagram 54 is Gate 54, Ambition.