Obstruction — 蹇

What Is Hexagram 39?

Hexagram 39, Jiǎn (蹇), Obstruction, is Mountain below and Water above, ䷦ — water standing on the top of a mountain, where water's tendency to run downward has been stopped, so that it can only pool and seep. It is the figure of the pass that cannot be walked, and its judgment answers the road with a direction and a companion rather than with a promise.

The 序卦 arrives here from 睽: 乖必有難，故受之以蹇；蹇者難也 — where people go apart, difficulty is sure to follow, and so comes 蹇, which means difficulty. It leaves by the next door, 物不可終難，故受之以解；解者緩也 — a difficulty cannot last forever, and so comes Hexagram 40, 解, Deliverance, which means loosening. The 雜卦 takes the pair in one breath, 解緩也，蹇難也: 解 is slackening, 蹇 is difficulty.

The 疏 defines the name by the posture rather than by the scenery. 「蹇」，難也。有險在前，畏而不進，故稱為「蹇」 — 蹇 means difficulty; there is danger ahead, one is afraid and does not advance, and that is what the word names. The definition matters because it puts the whole figure on the near side of the danger rather than inside it. Nothing in 蹇 has gone wrong yet. The difficulty is a thing seen ahead, and the figure is what a person does about that.

The geography is where it becomes specific. 利西南，不利東北: the southwest serves, the northeast does not. Wang Bi's note on the clause supplies the reason in one breath: 西南，地也，東北，山也。以難之平則難解，以難之山則道窮 — the southwest is earth and the northeast is mountain; meet the difficulty on level ground and it comes apart, meet it on a mountain and the road runs out. The 疏 turns that into a rule of conduct, 世道多難，率物以適平易，則蹇難可解。若入於險阻，則彌加擁塞 — when the times are full of difficulty, lead what is in your charge toward level and easy ground and the difficulty loosens; go into the obstructed places and it piles up higher.

Then the figure contradicts its own advice. The 說卦 gives each trigram a direction, and the northeast is the mountain's own: 艮，東北之卦也 — 艮 is the trigram of the northeast, where 萬物之所成終而所成始也, the place where things finish their ending and finish their beginning. The lower half of this hexagram is that trigram, and the upper half is 坎, whose direction the 說卦 gives as the north, 坎者，水也，正北方之卦也，勞卦也，萬物之所歸也 — water, the quarter of the north, the trigram of toil, the place the ten thousand things return to. The reader is set on the northeast and told not to walk northeast. The counsel is not about compass points. It is about which of the two directions available to someone in difficulty is the one that costs nothing.

Read across the judgment and the six lines and a curious census appears. There is no 凶 in this figure at all, and no 咎, no 悔, and no 吝 — not one of the four words the book uses for damage, in a hexagram whose name means difficulty. 吉 appears twice in the whole figure — 貞吉 in the judgment, and a single 吉 in the sixth line. 利 appears four times, three of them in the judgment and one in the last line. The name itself is said seven times across six lines, and 來, to come back, appears in five of the six, with 往, to go, standing beside it in four of them and 六二 the only line that has neither. The figure's counsel is repeated in its own vocabulary: go forward and you are blocked; come back and something is waiting.

The geometry carries part of the argument as well. This is 艮下坎上: Mountain at the bottom, Water at the top, ䷦, two firm lines against four yielding ones, and the two firm ones sitting in the third and fifth positions. By the book's own rule of place, which puts a firm line in an odd position and a yielding line in an even one, five of the six stand as their kind should and the first alone does not; the 疏 reckons by the places that carry office instead and finds each of them correct, 二、三、四、五爻皆當位，所以得正而吉. Turn the whole figure over and it becomes Hexagram 40, 解, Deliverance, the figure the 序卦 hands the sequence to next. Turn each line against itself instead and it becomes Hexagram 38, 睽, Opposition, which is where the 序卦 has just arrived from.

Trigram Structure

Mountain, 艮, holds the bottom of the figure and Water, 坎, the top, and the 說卦 gives each of them a single defining word, 坎，陷也…艮，止也: Water is what sinks in, Mountain is what stops. Read in the order they stand, danger after stopping, the two words are the whole 彖 in miniature: the lower trigram is the power to halt, and the upper one is the danger a person would otherwise have walked into.

Both halves of this figure are sons, and the 說卦's genealogy tells which: 坎再索而得男，故謂之中男…艮三索而得男，故謂之少男 — a son comes of the second drawing and is counted the middle one, a son comes of the third and is counted the youngest. The middle son above, the youngest below, and this time the 彖 says nothing about either of them, which is itself the measure of the distance from 睽 next door: that figure opens on a household, two daughters under one roof, and this one opens on a road. The 彖 moves straight to the two bodies and what they do, 蹇，難也，險在前也。見險而能止，知矣哉 — difficulty, with the danger ahead; to see the danger and be able to stop is understanding. The 疏 is precise about why the praise lands on the stopping rather than on the going: 坎在其外，是「險在前也」。有險在前，所以為難。若冒險而行，或罹其害。艮居其內，止而不往，相時而動，非知不能 — 坎 is outside, which is what 險在前 means; danger in front is what makes the difficulty; if you go into it anyway you may take the harm; and 艮 sits inside, stopping and not setting out, moving when the time moves, which nobody does without understanding.

The last clause of the 彖 is the one the figure keeps returning to. 蹇利西南，往得中也；不利東北，其道窮也。利見大人，往有功也。當位貞吉，以正邦也 — the southwest serves because going there lands in the middle; the northeast does not because the road runs out there; seeing the great man serves because the going is then effective; the places are correct and the correctness is good fortune because it sets a state right. The 疏 spells out the last of those as a piece of governing: 二、三、四、五爻皆當位，所以得正而吉…居難守正，正邦之道，故曰「以正邦」也. In a time of difficulty, standing correctly where you are is not private virtue; it is what holds a household or a country together while the road is closed.

Two inventories in the 說卦's eleventh chapter belong on this page. Water's list runs 坎為水、為溝瀆、為隱伏、為矯輮、為弓輪…其於人也，為加憂、為心病、為耳痛、為血卦、為赤。其於馬也，為美脊、為亟心、為下首、為薄蹄、為曳。其於輿也，為多眚、為通、為月、為盜 — water, ditches, what hides, what bends, the bow and wheel; among human things, added anxiety, heart sickness, earache, the trigram of blood, the color red; among horses, the fine ridge of the spine, the urgent heart, the dropped head, thin hooves, a dragging step; and among carriages, 多眚 and 通 in the same clause, many calamities and passage. Mountain's list gives 艮為山、為徑路、為小石、為門闕、為果蓏、為閽寺、為指、為狗、為鼠、為黔喙之屬 — mountain, footpath, small stones, the gate tower, tree fruit and vine fruit, the gatekeeper, the finger, the dog, the rat, the black-muzzled kind. The path is in the mountain's own inventory, which is the whole joke of the figure: the trigram that can stop is also the trigram that knows the way through, and it stops anyway. One short chapter of the 說卦 assigns the eight trigrams to parts of a body, and this pair comes out as 坎為耳…艮為手 — an ear above, a hand below, which is already close to the 大象's instruction drawn as anatomy.

The 疏 saves one of its best readings for last, quoting Lu Ji on the picture itself. 陸績曰：「水在山上，失流通之性，故曰蹇。」通水流下，今在山上，不得下流，蹇之象。陸績又曰：「水本應山下，今在山上，終應反下，故曰反身。」 — water on a mountain has lost the nature of flowing through, which is 蹇; water ought by rights to be below the mountain, and since it is on top of it, it must end by turning back down, and that turning back down is what 反身 means. The Image's instruction to turn back on oneself is not a moral added to a landscape. Lu Ji derives it from the water, and the water has nowhere else to go.

The Judgment

蹇：利西南，不利東北；利見大人，貞吉。

Jiǎn: lì xīnán, bù lì dōngběi; lì jiàn dà rén, zhēn jí.

Our rendering: Obstruction: the southwest serves, the northeast does not. It serves to see the great man: holding to what is correct, good fortune.

Read clause by clause:

The judgment's shape is telling: three of its four clauses are about direction and company, and only the last is about the reader's own conduct. That is a fair description of a difficulty, which is mostly a matter of where a person is standing and who is standing near them, and only secondarily of what they are like. And the 彖 does not treat the fourth clause as an afterthought. 當位貞吉，以正邦也 is a claim about a public good: when everyone in a bad situation holds their own place correctly, the difficulty is survivable by the group and not only by the individual.

Jungian reading: the ordering of the clauses is the part Jung would have recognized. Danger is seen first, then the direction is chosen, then the person to travel with is identified, and only at the end is anything demanded of the reader's own character — and the demand is steadiness rather than strength. Jung's account of what a person should do at an impasse, set out in the essay he wrote in 1916 and published much later as The Transcendent Function, is that the two obvious moves are both wrong: forcing a decision on either side destroys the material the situation is made of, and doing nothing at all is just as fatal. What he asked for instead was for the person to hold the position honestly and keep looking. That is close to 見險而能止 and to the figure's repeated 來, coming back, which is neither of the two things a person in trouble usually does. It is not forcing the issue and it is not drifting; it is turning around and standing still long enough to see. Jung's own years of it, the long stretch he called his confrontation with the unconscious, were spent almost entirely on work nobody would have called progress: he read his own material, he did not publish, and the outward career that everyone expected of him went nowhere. Jung held that the material an impasse is made of is the material the next stage of a life can be built from, and that a person who skips it by solving it too quickly arrives somewhere with nothing of their own in it. The judgment asks for one thing and it is not success. It is 貞.

The Image

山上有水，蹇；君子以反身修德。

Shān shàng yǒu shuǐ, Jiǎn; jūn zǐ yǐ fǎn shēn xiū dé.

Our rendering: Water on the mountain: Obstruction. The noble one therefore turns back on himself and cultivates his character.

Wang Bi's note is eight characters of counsel, 除難莫若反身脩德 (the commentary writes 脩 where the classic writes 修) — for getting out of a difficulty there is nothing better than turning back on yourself and cultivating your character — and the 疏 explains why the outward route is closed: 蹇難之時，未可以進，惟宜反求諸身，自脩其德，道成德立，方能濟險 — in a time of difficulty there is no advancing to be done; what is left is to look for it in yourself and put your own character in order, and only when the way in you is made and the character stands does crossing the danger become possible at all.

The 疏's gloss on the picture itself is where the Image earns its authority: 山者是岩險，水是阻難。水積山上，彌益危難 — the mountain is the crag, the water is the obstruction, and water gathering on a mountain only makes the danger worse. Water on a mountain is not a scene of difficulty; it is a scene that is becoming more difficult while you look at it. That is why the Image does not send the noble one toward the water. There is nothing to be done about water standing above its own level, and the figure declines to pretend otherwise.

Then the 疏 closes with a sentence that makes the chapter more than advice: 君子通達道暢之時，並濟天下，處窮之時則獨善其身也 — when the way is open and the road runs clear, a person works for the whole world; in a poor time, one takes care of oneself alone. The Image is not recommending introspection as a mood. It is naming the work the situation still pays for. Four more characters of the 疏 carry the same point, 道成德立: the way is made inside first, and there is no shortcut around the making.

Jungian reading: 反身修德 is a two-part instruction, and Jung's whole psychology of the second half of life rests on the first part of it — that there is something to turn toward that is not the problem. The self Jung described is not the ego and not the persona, and it cannot be reached by doing more of what the ego is already good at; it is found by a movement that looks like withdrawal and is not. He also insisted that this movement has an outward consequence, which is the second part of the instruction: the Chinese does not say turn inward and stay there, it says 修德, put the character in order, and a character in order is by definition visible to other people. Lu Ji's two sentences hold both halves. In a clear time, the work goes out into the world; in a blocked time, it goes down into the ground of the person doing it. What Jung would not have accepted is the reading that makes the second half a retreat from life. He spent the years of his own turn inward building something, and the thing he built was the capacity to be of use for the rest of his working life.

The Lines

初六：往蹇，來譽。 (Wǎng jiǎn, lái yù.) The way out is blocked; the way back is praise.

Wang Bi's note on the first line is the figure's method in one sentence: 處難之始，居止之初，獨見前識，睹險而止，以待其時，知矣哉 — standing at the beginning of a difficulty and at the beginning of stopping, seeing it ahead of anyone else, catching sight of the danger and halting, waiting for its time: this is understanding. The 疏 places it inside the trigram and draws the conclusion, 初居艮始，是能見險而止。見險不往，則是來而得譽 — it sits at the start of Mountain, which is the capacity to see the danger and stop, and not going is precisely what earns it the praise.

The praise is what makes the line unusual. The 繫辭下 states a rule of thumb about the six places, 二多譽，四多懼，近也 — praise tends to gather at the second place and fear at the fourth, because those are the two that stand closest to the seat of power; and the praise in this figure falls on a line that is both first and, by the position rule, the only one of the six standing out of place. The Small Says reduce the whole matter to the three characters 宜待也, wait. 疏 on them: 既「往則遇蹇」，宜止以待時也 — since going meets the obstruction, it is right to stop and wait for the time. The 繫辭下's line about the accomplished person belongs here as its best commentary: 君子藏器於身，待時而動，何不利之有 — a noble one keeps the instrument on his person and moves when the time comes, so how could there be anything unlucky in that. The instrument is the only thing the line asks a person to have. It does not ask them to have a way through.

六二：王臣蹇蹇，匪躬之故。 (Wáng chén jiǎn jiǎn, fěi gōng zhī gù.) The king's servant: blocked twice over, and none of it on his own account.

This is the one line of the six that contains neither 往 nor 來, and the one place in the figure where the name is doubled. Wang Bi reads the doubling as the point: 處難之時，履當其位，居不失中，以應於五。不以五在難中，私身遠害，執心不回，志匡王室者也 — in a time of difficulty, standing correctly, holding the middle without losing it, answering to the fifth line, and refusing to use the fifth line's trouble as a reason to look after its own skin. The 疏 is explicit about who is who: 「王」謂五也。「臣」謂二也。九五居於王位而在難中，六二是五之臣，往應於五，履正居中，志匡王室，能涉蹇難，而往濟蹇 — the king is the fifth line, the servant is the second, the fifth is on the throne and inside the difficulty, and the second is its servant, correct in place, central in position, whose whole intention is to set the royal house straight, and which therefore walks into the difficulty rather than away from it. And the reason, 盡忠於君，匪以私身之故而不往濟君: it does not stay home on its own account.

The Small Says close it with four characters, 終无尤也, in the end no fault; the 疏 makes even that mild, 處難以斯，豈有過尤也 — conducting oneself through a difficulty this way, how would there be any fault to find. The line is the figure's counterweight. The other five lines of the figure are counsel about turning back; this one is told that the difficulty it enters is not its own, and the book does not hold it against a person for going in when what they are carrying is somebody else's. Nothing in the line promises that this works. The verdict is the absence of a verdict.

九三：往蹇，來反。 (Wǎng jiǎn, lái fǎn.) The way out is blocked; the way back is where he turns around.

The third line is the firm line of the lower trigram, and Wang Bi's note gives it both halves of its situation: 進則入險，來則得位，故曰「往蹇來反」。為下卦之主，是內之所恃也 — go forward and it enters the danger, come back and it holds its proper place; and as the ruler of the lower trigram it is what the inside rests on. The 疏 supplies the geography, 九三與《坎》為鄰 — the third line is 坎's neighbor, standing directly underneath the water, and that adjacency is what makes 往 a mistake rather than an adventure.

The Small Says explain the word 反 from the side of the other two lines: 往蹇來反，內喜之也, the inside is glad of it. 疏: 內卦三爻，惟九三一陽居二陰之上，是內之所恃，故云「內喜之」也 — of the three lines of the lower trigram only the third is firm, it sits above the other two yielding ones, and it is what the inside relies on, so the inside is glad when it comes back. The line is the figure's answer to a particular kind of ambition. A person in the middle of an obstruction, standing on the last firm ground before it, with everything behind them depending on them, often reads their own position as a reason to press on; the line reads the same position as a reason to return, and the gladness is not their own.

六四：往蹇，來連。 (Wǎng jiǎn, lái lián.) The way out is blocked; the way back is 連 — held to, or held up.

The fourth line is the first one inside the water, and neither direction from it is available. 往則無應，來則乘剛，往來皆難 — go forward and there is no counterpart, come back and it rides over a firm line, so that both directions are difficult, which is what the doubled verdict in the line means. Then Wang Bi refuses to treat the position as a misfortune: 得位履正，當其本實，雖遇於難，非妄所招也 — it holds its place correctly and keeps to what is real in it, and the difficulty it meets was not invited by anything reckless. The 疏 on the Small Says says the same with the word 數: 往來遇難者，乃數之所招，非邪妄之所致也, the difficulty came from circumstance and was not brought on by anything improper. 當位實也 is how the Small Says put it, in place and solid.

The word 連 has no agreed meaning and the 疏 keeps both readings: 馬云「連亦難」也。鄭云「遲久之意」 — Ma Rong read it as difficulty again, Zheng Xuan as the sense of delay, of a long time. The line does not choose between them, and the two readings describe the same experience from its two ends: what is coming back is a drawing-together that takes a while. There is no counterpart for this line, so what it has instead is whatever stands near enough to be held on to. The figure gives it no company and no blame, and calls the place it stands in solid.

九五：大蹇，朋來。 (Dà jiǎn, péng lái.) Obstruction at its greatest: those of his own aim arrive.

The fifth line is the figure's ruler, and it stands alone in the middle of the water. Its text carries no 往 at all; the only movement it names is 來, and it is one of the two lines of the six that never say 往. Wang Bi's note begins with its isolation, 處難之時，獨在險中，難之大者也，故曰「大蹇」 — in a time of difficulty it is alone in the middle of the danger, and this is the greatest of the difficulties, which is why the line says 大蹇 rather than 蹇. Then the note turns, and the whole turn hangs on refusing to move: 然居不失正，履不失中，執德之長，不改其節，如此則同志者集而至矣，故曰「朋來」也 — but it does not lose its correctness, it does not lose its centrality, it holds its virtue for the long haul and does not change its measure, and when that is how it stands, those who share its aim gather and arrive, which is what 朋來 means. The 疏 keeps the emphasis on the refusal, 得位履正，不改其節，如此則同志者自遠而來.

The vocabulary matters here, because the 疏 stops on it. 鄭注《論語》云：「同門曰朋，同志曰友。」此對友也。通而言之，同志亦是朋黨也 — Zheng Xuan's note on the Analects distinguishes the two words: those of the same gate are 朋, those of the same aim are 友; used loosely, those of the same aim are also a party. The line's arriving company is defined by shared aim and not by affection, and the line's own contribution to their arrival is that it did not move. The Small Says give the mechanism in four characters, 以中節也, and the 疏 unfolds them: 得位居中，不易其節，故致「朋來」. The hardest place in the figure is passed by one line's refusal to change its measure while standing in it, and the help that arrives is a consequence of the standing rather than a rescue from outside.

上六：往蹇，來碩，吉；利見大人。 (Wǎng jiǎn, lái shuò, jí; lì jiàn dà rén.) The way out is blocked; what comes back is large: good fortune. It serves to see the great man.

The top line is the end of the difficulty, and Wang Bi reads the two halves of the line against each other: 往則長難，來則難終，難終則眾難皆濟，志大得矣，故曰「往蹇來碩吉」。險夷難解，大道可興，故曰「利見大人」也 — going draws the difficulty out, coming back ends it, and an ended difficulty means every difficulty in it has been crossed, which is what 碩 measures; with the danger leveled and the difficulty loosened the great road can be put back into use, which is why the line says 利見大人. The 疏 clarifies 碩 in one character, 碩，大也, and gives the line's position, 上六難終之地，不宜更有所往 — the top line is the place where difficulty ends, and it is not the place to go anywhere further.

The Small Says carry two clauses instead of one, and the second is about the great man: 往蹇來碩，志在內也。利見大人，以從貴也. 志在內 because 有應在三 — its counterpart is the third line back inside the lower trigram, and 應既在內，往則失之，來則得之, so that going loses what coming back keeps. And 以從貴也, because of what it follows: 貴謂陽也。以從陽，故云「以從貴」也 — the honored here means the firm line, and to follow it is to follow what is honored. The judgment's phrase 利見大人 is used there about a person a reader might go to for help; the last line's own resolution of it is not an outside appointment at all, since what it is told to follow stands inside the figure, in the third place, one trigram back and three places down. The line's good fortune does not arrive with anything new. It is what the figure had all along, seen from the end of the road instead of the beginning.

Daily Life

What this figure is about is a road that is genuinely closed, and its first move is to establish that this is not a test of nerve. 見險而能止，知矣哉 puts the wisdom in the stopping; the 疏 says the person who walks in anyway may simply take the harm. There is a kind of difficulty that can only be crossed by entering it, and 蹇 is not about that kind — the water on this mountain has nowhere to flow, and the figure spends six lines saying so in six ways. Five of the six lines of a figure named Difficulty end in something coming back, and the book assigns the whole figure no 凶, no 咎, no 悔, and no 吝. That is not optimism. It is the reason 來, coming back, can be repeated five times without the figure sounding defeated: in this hexagram the retreat is the way through, and the only losses on the page are the ones nobody took.

The Image's counsel is the part that translates into a week. 反身修德, turning back on yourself and putting your character in order, is what Lu Ji derived from water that has to come down off the mountain anyway, and the 疏's sentence about it divides a life into two modes, 通達道暢之時，並濟天下，處窮之時則獨善其身 — when the road is clear you work for the whole world, and when it is not you take care of yourself alone. Most people spend a blocked season doing the outward work badly, because the outward work is what they can measure. The 疏's claim is that in that season the inward work is the one that compounds, and that a person arrives at the far side of the obstruction with whatever they built while they were waiting. Nothing in the figure says a blocked road is a lesson. It says the road is blocked and you have between now and the thaw.

The four middle lines describe the four ways of behaving inside that. 六二 goes into a difficulty that is not its own, and the verdict is only 終无尤, no fault — the figure's way of saying that duty is a legitimate reason to spend yourself and not a promise of return. 九三 returns because everything below it depends on it returning. 六四 holds on to what is near it and takes the long reading of 連, since it has no counterpart and only time. 九五 refuses to alter its measure in the worst position in the figure, and the help arrives as a consequence. Read together they are a fair picture of the two or three years of any blocked ambition, and the only line in the figure that receives 吉 is the last one, which does the least and comes back the furthest. 上六 ends with the judgment's own words, 利見大人, and the figure's quiet answer about the great man is that he was the firm line the top line already answered to. In 蹇 the help and the resource are what stayed inside the figure while everybody was being told not to go.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What does Hexagram 39 mean in one sentence?

That there is a road with water standing on it and no way across, and that the useful thing in that situation is to turn around and put your own house in order until it clears. The 疏 defines the name as difficulty with the danger still ahead, 「蹇」，難也。有險在前，畏而不進，故稱為「蹇」, and the 彖 puts the wisdom in the stopping rather than in the crossing, 見險而能止，知矣哉. The figure's counsel is repeated in its own words: 來, to come back, appears in five of its six lines. It never once says 凶, and the single 吉 of the line text goes to the line that has come back the furthest.

Is Obstruction a bad hexagram to receive?

It is a hard situation rather than a bad verdict, and the census is the evidence: four words the book uses for damage — 凶, 咎, 悔, 吝 — do not occur once in the judgment or in any of the six lines. 吉 appears twice, once as 貞吉 and once at the top. What the figure withholds is not protection but scope: three of the judgment's four clauses are about direction and company, and the one thing asked of the reader is steadiness, 貞吉, which Wang Bi ties to the whole figure standing in its proper places, 爻皆當位，各履其正. The 疏 is blunt about the alternative, 居難之時，若不守正而行其邪道，雖見大人，亦不得吉. A closed road is not a verdict on the person standing in front of it.

Why does the judgment say the southwest serves and the northeast does not?

Because the two quarters are the two ways of meeting a difficulty. Wang Bi reads them as ground, 西南，地也，東北，山也。以難之平則難解，以難之山則道窮 — on the level the difficulty comes apart, on the mountain the road runs out — and the 疏 generalizes it into conduct, 世道多難，率物以適平易，則蹇難可解。若入於險阻，則彌加擁塞. The figure then stands on the northeast while telling the reader not to go there: the 說卦 assigns that direction to 艮, the mountain that makes up the lower half of this hexagram, 艮，東北之卦也，萬物之所成終而所成始也. The advice is not about geography. It is about which of the two directions open to a person in trouble is the one that costs them nothing.

What does “turn back on yourself and cultivate your character” mean in practice?

It means the inward work is what the season pays for, and it comes from the picture rather than from a moral. Lu Ji's reading, quoted in the 疏, is 水本應山下，今在山上，終應反下，故曰反身 — water belongs below the mountain, it is on top of it, and it must end by turning back down, which is what 反身 means. The 疏 draws the practical line, 蹇難之時，未可以進，惟宜反求諸身，自脩其德，道成德立，方能濟險, and then names the two modes of a life, 通達道暢之時，並濟天下，處窮之時則獨善其身也. The figure is not recommending introspection as a mood. It is naming the work available while the road is closed, and it expects the work to be visible when the road opens.

The I Ching is a mirror for reflection, not a prediction machine.