The sixty-fourth Gene Key runs from confusion through imagination to illumination, and it closes the set on a note of arrival. The hexagram it sits on closes its own book on precisely the opposite note, and the contrast is the best single illustration of what these two layers are doing.
The sixty-fourth hexagram is Before Completion. It is the last figure in the King Wen sequence, and its defining property is that every one of its six lines stands in the wrong place: yang lines where yin lines belong and yin where yang belongs, the most disordered arrangement the system permits. Its image is a young fox crossing an icy river who, almost at the far bank, gets its tail wet.
That the I Ching ends here rather than with the sixty-third, After Completion, in which every line stands correctly, is a deliberate and much-discussed feature of the text. The book refuses to end in resolution. The sequence of changes has no terminus, and the figure of perfect order is placed second to last precisely so that it cannot be mistaken for a conclusion.
The modern reading takes the same number and ends in illumination.
Neither is wrong on its own terms. But the difference is not a matter of emphasis. The classical text is making a specific philosophical claim, that completion is not available and that the appearance of it is the beginning of disorder. Rudd's spectrum, like all sixty-four of them, terminates in a transcendent state. One book ends in a wet tail and the other in light, and a reader is better served by seeing both than by having them reconciled.