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Sacred Correspondences
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Rightful Judgment, and the Work Still Left After It

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Rightful Judgment, and the Work Still Left After It

Rightful judgment is what this line describes, and Conflict grants it great good fortune rather than the qualified or cautionary reading every other line receives. It is the only station in the hexagram where a yang stroke sits correctly placed in an odd position at the center of the upper trigram, firmness and centrality together, the single most favored configuration the classical system recognizes. When this line changes, the central stroke of Qian becomes yielding, turning the upper trigram into Li, fire and clarity, while the lower trigram Kan remains fixed below.

The resulting hexagram is Number 64, Before Completion, fire over water, the final hexagram of the entire sequence of sixty four, an image of a situation nearly but not yet resolved, every line out of its usual correct place, poised on the edge of order without having fully arrived at it. That the one moment of clean, rightful judgment in Conflict should transform into the hexagram of things almost, but not quite, settled is a fitting closing note: even the fairest resolution of a dispute does not erase every consequence of it, and what follows a just judgment is still a situation requiring further, careful completion. That the full sequence of sixty four hexagrams itself ends on Before Completion is worth noting, since it places the one moment of rightful judgment in Conflict a single change away from the final figure in the entire system.

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