Hexagram 29: The Abysmal

坎 (Kǎn)

Danger and difficulty that must be faced with courage.

Overview

A time of danger and hard trials has come into your life. How did you end up here? Think back to how things developed before. For a long time everything you planned worked out, and life went on without much worry or difficulty. Such an easy life was bound to make you less watchful. You forgot that sooner or later life can turn and show you its other side.

If you had seen the danger coming in time, you would not be in such a hard place today. But you noticed too late that everything was going wrong. You only woke up when the situation had already changed completely. Now you need to look for a way out of the crisis, and quickly.

People around you

Your relationships with the people around you matter a great deal here. Much depends on whether you can win them over, and on whether you find it easy to talk to them or tend to keep to yourself. The place you hold among them today decides how well your work will go later. Do not quarrel, and do not turn people against you. If you do, you will create obstacles that are very hard to get past.

Work

Give a large part of your time to work. That is where all your future plans are built. Do not hurry to change your line of work, even if your present job no longer interests you. This situation does not call for a hasty move. Wait for the right moment, so that you do not make a mistake you cannot undo.

Your wish

Your wish has to wait for now. The main thing is to correct the mistakes of the past. Until you do that, it is hard to speak about any progress. First make the conditions of your life better. Then your wish can come nearer.

This Overview is one traditional reading of the figure, offered as a prompt for reflection and perspective rather than a prediction of a fixed future. Where this material comes from.

New to the sequence? See how lines, trigrams and changing lines work, or cast your own reading with the three-coin method.

Structure

Read from the bottom upward, hexagram 29 is Water over Water. Its two inner, or nuclear, trigrams are Mountain over Thunder. What the eight trigrams mean.

Upper trigram (lines 4–6): Kǎn · Water Deep and dangerous
Lower trigram (lines 1–3): Kǎn · Water Deep and dangerous
Upper nuclear (lines 3–5): Gèn · Mountain Still and stopping
Lower nuclear (lines 2–4): Zhèn · Thunder Arousing and moving