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Misfortune That Arrives Through No Fault of Your Own

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Misfortune That Arrives Through No Fault of Your Own

Some losses are not lessons. Someone drawing this changing line is being told that the setback in question did not originate with them, and that searching their own conduct for its cause will not turn anything up. The image of an ox tethered by its owner and taken by a stranger, with the cost landing on a whole neighbourhood, describes damage that travels sideways: the person who suffers it is not the person who caused it and often not even the person it was aimed at.

The counsel this implies is mostly about attribution. Innocence is explicitly granted to the sufferer in the text, so the reading does not ask for repentance, correction, or a change of course. It asks that the loss be named as external, absorbed, and left there, resisting the very human move of manufacturing a fault to explain it, since a fault invented after the event tends to produce changes that make matters worse.

Incorrectly placed in an odd position at the top of the lower trigram Zhen, and the most exposed station in the hexagram, this line marks a moment of genuine bad luck rather than of consequence. A reading here is unusually free of instruction, because there is nothing in it the querent could have done differently.

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