大畜 Great Restraint
Upper trigram: Mountain (the mountain) · Lower trigram: Heaven (the sky)
Accumulate power — great restraint now becomes great strength later.
Modern interpretation
Restraint now is power later. Study, save, train, prepare — and do not spend your strength on small things. You are storing energy for something worthy; honor the discipline and the moment to release it will come.
The Judgment · 卦辞
利贞。不家食吉。利涉大川。
“Under the conditions of Tâ Khû it will be advantageous to be firm and correct. (If its subject do not seek to) enjoy his revenues in his own family (without taking service at court), there will be good fortune. It will be advantageous for him to cross the great stream.” — James Legge, The Yî King (1882)
The six lines · 爻辞
Read from the bottom line upward. Each line pairs the received Chinese text with Legge's English translation.
有厉，利已。
“The first line, undivided, shows its subject in a position of peril. It will be advantageous for him to stop his advance.”
舆说輹。
“The second line, undivided, shows a carriage with the strap under it removed.”
良马逐，利艰贞，曰闲舆卫，利有攸往。
“The third line, undivided, shows its subject urging his way with good horses. It will be advantageous for him to realise the difficulty (of his course), and to be firm and correct, exercising himself daily in his charioteering and methods of defence; then there will be advantage in whatever direction he may advance.”
童牛之牿，元吉。
“The fourth line, divided, shows the young bull, (and yet) having the piece of wood over his horns. There will be great good fortune.”
豮豕之牙，吉。
“The fifth line, divided, shows the teeth of a castrated hog. There will be good fortune.”
何天之衢，亨。
“The sixth line, undivided, shows its subject (as) in command of the firmament of heaven. There will be progress.”
About changing lines
In a real I Ching reading, hexagrams are built by casting coins or yarrow stalks six times, bottom line first. Some lines come out “old” (unstable) — an old yin or old yang flips into its opposite, producing a second hexagram that shows where the situation is heading. The changing lines are the moving parts of your answer: read their individual line statements above, and they point to the direction of change.
Ask a question and cast the coins — free, with a plain-English interpretation grounded in the classical text.
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