Force That Arrives Too Fast to Be Given Anywhere to Rest

Nine in the fourth place is a warning about entrances. A querent drawing it should examine how something is being introduced rather than whether it is right, because the line does not dispute the substance of what arrives. It reports that the manner of the arrival makes the thing impossible to accommodate. Fire, death and rejection are stacked into a single clause, and the commentary reduces the whole matter to the observation that nobody can put up with the subject.

The reading applies as readily to a person entering a settled group as to a proposal dropped into an organisation with no preparation. In both cases the energy is genuine and the reception is fatal to it. What the hexagram values throughout is light that has found something firm to cling to, and what this line shows is light with nothing under it at all, spending itself in the instant of appearing.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Li becomes Gen and the figure becomes Grace, King Wen 22, in which mountain holds fire and form is given to what would otherwise merely blaze. The remedy is named by the destination rather than by the line itself. Stillness above brightness is the arrangement in which a flame is shaped and shown to advantage, and it is the exact correction of an entrance made with no form at all.