After Completion — 既济

What Is Hexagram 63?

Hexagram 63, 既濟 (jì jì), After Completion, is the sixty-third figure of the classic: 離 Fire below, 坎 Water above. 濟 is the word for getting a river behind you and 既 marks the thing as finished, so the name describes a crossing already made. It is the one figure in the book whose six lines all stand in the positions their polarity calls for, and the one where that perfect arrangement is the problem.

The 疏 in the 周易正義 opens by defining both halves of the name rather than treating it as a compound: 濟者，濟渡之名，既者，皆盡之稱，萬事皆濟，故以「既濟」為名 — 濟 names the act of crossing, 既 is the word for all of it used up, and when every matter has been carried across, that is what the figure is called. The first of the two characters is the one that matters. 既 is not "already" in the sense of "and then": it is 皆盡, everything spent and nothing held back. The figure is not named for a state that has been reached. It is named for a state that has been exhausted.

Then the judgment does something unusual. It grants passage, marks the small ones as the ones who pass, promises a good beginning and names a disorder at the end — and it does all of it in eight characters. 亨小 is the odd phrase in the middle: not 小亨, a small passage, but 亨 with the small ones marked as the subject. The 彖 explains, and the 疏 notices something the text is doing on purpose: 具足為文，當更有一「小」字 — spelled out in full, the sentence would carry another 小, reading 亨，小者亨也, passage, and it is the small things that get through. The classic compresses it, and the compression is part of the meaning: when everything is done, what is left to talk about is the little that still has to move.

The Sequence puts this figure at the end of a chain rather than at the end of the book: 有過物者，必濟 — what surpasses the ordinary thing is what crosses over — and then, one line later, 物不可窮也，故受之以未濟；終焉. The book closes on Hexagram 64, whose name says not yet. The 雜卦 gives this figure two characters and its successor four: 既濟定也 ... 未濟男之窮也. 定, settled — the whole compliment the tradition pays this figure; the next one gets four characters, and they are about the exhaustion of the male.

(The 周易 text writes the negative 无 where the 正義 volume writes 無; quotations here follow the 周易.)

Trigram Structure

Water above, fire below. 離 is 麗, the attaching, and in the 說卦's list of natures it is the one name among the eight that implies dependence: 坎，陷也。離，麗也. Above it 坎 is 陷, sinking in. Fire burns upward into water and water sits on top of it, and the result is not conflict. The 疏 on the Image names the object: 炊爨之象, the image of a cooking fire — a pot on a stove. Food is made there, and life is carried across by it.

The contrast with the next figure is the cleanest single sentence in the two commentaries. Of Hexagram 64 the 疏 writes: 火在水上，不成烹飪，未能濟物 — the fire is on top of the water, nothing cooks, and nothing gets carried over. Two figures, two arrangements of the same two elements, and the entire difference between completion and incompletion is whether dinner is being made. One is a kitchen at work; the other is a fire with nothing to cook in.

The 說卦 gives the pair two more descriptions, and they are not the same description. In the third chapter, among the eight relations: 天地定位，山澤通氣，雷風相薄，水火不相射. Water and fire do not shoot at one another — that is the pair's peaceful arrangement. The sixth chapter ends on a warmer word: 故水火相逮，雷風不相悖，山澤通氣，然後能變化，既成萬物也. 相逮, they reach and catch each other; only then does anything change, and only then are the ten thousand things brought to completion. 既濟 is the figure where that reaching is in place: water installed over fire, fire feeding it from below, each doing what its nature does.

Both trigrams are the middle children. 坎再索而得男，故謂之中男；離再索而得女，故謂之中女 — the second exchange of the primal pair yields a son and a daughter, and both are 中, middle. This is the figure of two middles, and the geometry carries it: 六二 holds the middle of the lower trigram, 九五 holds the middle of the upper, and those two seats are precisely where middleness and right placement fall together. That is why the 彖 can rest the good beginning on a single line: 初吉，柔得中也 — the yielding line has the middle.

The lists of images in the eleventh chapter are worth reading against each other, because the lower half of this figure is light and heat — with armor and weapons in its own list — and the upper half is all anxiety. 離為火、為日、為電、為中女、為甲冑、為戈兵 — fire, sun, lightning, the middle daughter, armor, weapons. 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 — water, the ditch, what hides away, what bends, the bow and the wheel; and where people are concerned, a worry added to what was already there, a sickness of the heart, an aching of the ear, the trigram of blood, red. Structurally, the exposure in this figure sits above, in the trigram whose human images are ailments, and everything that does the work sits below. That is the whole architecture, and the top line confirms it.

The construction is exact. Reading the six lines from the bottom: firm, yielding, firm, yielding, firm, yielding, which is 101010, and every one of those six sits where its kind belongs — 剛柔正而位當也. Checked across all sixty-four figures, the tradition's claim holds: 既濟 is the only one with six out of six, and 未濟 is the only one with none. Correspondence follows from placement: odd and even partners are opposite in polarity here, so all three of the answering pairs — first with fourth, second with fifth, third with sixth — are live. The figure is not merely well ordered; it is fully connected.

Two structural facts shape everything that follows. Turn the six strokes upside down and they come back as 010101; exchange each line for its opposite and they come back as 010101 again. 既濟 and 未濟 are therefore both 綜卦 and 錯卦 to one another, and there are only eight figures in the book with that property. For most hexagrams the two operations lead to different neighbors; here they lead to the same one. And 王弼 says where the seam actually is: 未濟之始，始於既濟之上六也 — the incomplete begins inside the top line of the complete. Sitting at the very top of a finished arrangement is already the first moment of its undoing.

The Judgment

既濟：亨小。利貞。初吉終亂。

Jì jì: hēng xiǎo. Lì zhēn. Chū jí zhōng luàn.

Our rendering: After Completion: there is passage, and the small things are the ones that get through. What serves is to hold to what is correct. The opening goes well; the close comes apart.

Character by character. 既, all of it used up. 濟, the crossing. 亨, passage, the current running through. 小: 王弼 takes it as part of the definition of the name rather than as a limit on the luck: 既濟者，以皆濟為義者也。小者不遺，乃為皆濟，故舉小者，以明既濟也, only when the small ones are not left behind is anything truly finished, so the text names the small ones to show what finished means. 利貞: 利 is what is useful, 貞 the holding of a thing steady, and 王弼 makes the link to placement: 剛柔正而位當，則邪不可以行矣，故唯正乃利貞也, when every line is correctly placed there is nowhere for what is crooked to go, and so only correctness serves. 初吉 and 終亂 are the two halves of the sentence that the rest of this entry turns on. 亂 is a rare word here: it occurs in only one other place in the judgments and line texts of the whole book, the first line of Hexagram 45, 萃, where it describes a crowd in disarray.

The 彖 reads the judgment in four clauses: 既濟，亨，小者亨也。利貞，剛柔正而位當也。初吉，柔得中也。終止則亂，其道窮也. Note what the last clause adds that the judgment does not: 止. The disorder is not decreed; it is conditional on stopping, and 王弼 says this as flatly as it can be said — 終亂不為自亂，由止故亂, the disorder at the close is not self-generated, it is caused by the halt. Then he states the mechanism of every finished system: 以既濟為安者，道極無進，終唯有亂, whoever takes completion as a place of rest finds that the way has run to its limit with nowhere further to advance, and in the end there is only disorder. The 疏 draws the operative conclusion: 若能進脩不止，則既濟無終 — if one keeps advancing and cultivating without stopping, completion has no end. 初吉終亂 is not a claim about what will happen to you. It is a description of what going quiet does to a working arrangement, and the figure's own placement leaves it no slack: six lines in perfect order have nowhere left to move.

Jungian reading. Jung had a word for the turn this figure describes: enantiodromia, the tendency of a one-sided state to swing into its opposite once it has gone as far as it can go. He also thought the second half of life could not be lived on the program of the first, and the failure he described most often was not catastrophe but the successful person who keeps running the earlier program because it worked — the career that becomes a performance of the career, the marriage that becomes an administration of the marriage. 王弼's 止 and Jung's one-sidedness are the same diagnosis from two directions: the danger in this figure is not the water on top. It is the fire deciding that it has done enough.

The Image

水在火上，既濟；君子以思患而豫防之。

Shuǐ zài huǒ shàng, jì jì; jūn zǐ yǐ sī huàn ér yù fáng zhī.

Our rendering: Water above fire: After Completion. The noble one therefore keeps the trouble in view and blocks it before it arrives.

王弼's note on this Image is brief, and it is the sort of sentence a state could be run on: 存不忘亡，既濟不忘未濟也 — while you endure, do not forget perishing; being complete, do not forget incomplete.

The 疏 supplies the physical reading first, since the line is not a metaphor to it but a kitchen: 水在火上，炊爨之象，飲食以之而成，性命以之而濟. Then it turns to the instruction: 但既濟之道，初吉終亂，故君子思其後患，而豫防之 — the way of this figure is a good beginning and a disordered close, so the noble one keeps the later trouble in view and guards against it beforehand. Two words carry it. 思患 is not anxiety and not pessimism: 患 is a specific named trouble, not a general dread, and 思 is the act of keeping it in front of the mind. 豫防 is a measure taken before the thing exists — 豫 here is the graph for beforehand, the same character that names Hexagram 16, so the tradition writes "prevention" with the word for preparedness. Note the shape of the instruction: nothing is built, nothing is expanded, no further work is begun. Everything the Image asks for is maintenance, and it is asked of someone whose position is already good.

Jungian reading. This is the figure's least glamorous instruction and one that Jung returns to often. The ego's task after an achievement is not to consolidate the achievement into an identity; the identification with a successful adaptation is what he called inflation, and it always ends in the same way, because a person who is his success cannot afford to notice the leak. 存不忘亡 is a working definition of what he meant by consciousness: keeping in view the thing that is not currently true. The figure does not ask the noble one to be anxious about the future. It asks that the specific failure be named in advance, which is a different and much rarer competence.

The Lines

初九：曳其輪，濡其尾，无咎。 Yè qí lún, rú qí wěi, wú jiù. The wheel is dragged; the tail gets soaked: no blame.

The line begins at the beginning of the crossing, before the far bank. 王弼: 最處既濟之初，始濟者也。始濟未涉於燥，故輪曳而尾濡也 — at the very start of the crossing, not yet out of the wet, so the wheels are held back and the tail is in the water. Then the part that makes it no blame: 雖未造易，心無顧戀，志棄難者也 — it has not yet reached the easy ground, but it is not looking back at what it is leaving, and its intention is to abandon the difficulty. The 疏 keeps it concrete: 體剛居中，是始欲濟渡也. The small image gives the verdict as a matter of 義: 曳其輪，義无咎也 — no fault in what it is doing.

Worth noticing how the same two acts are split across two lines in Hexagram 64. There, 初六 is 濡其尾 and 九二 is 曳其輪, one wet tail and one held wheel, in two separate places; here they are pressed into a single line at the threshold. 濡其 elsewhere in the book appears only in these two figures, and the wet tail belongs to the fox of 未濟's judgment: 小狐汔濟，濡其尾. The discomfort of the first stage is the same discomfort in both, and the figure that is already across opens by admitting that getting across starts with being wet.

六二：婦喪其茀，勿逐，七日得。 Fù sàng qí fú, wù zhú, qī rì dé. The woman has lost her head-ornament: do not chase it; in seven days it is had again.

The 疏 is brief on the noun and the 注 is long on the situation: 茀者，婦人之首飾也 — 茀 is a woman's head-ornament, the thing that marks her standing. Then 王弼: 居中履正，處文明之盛，而應乎五，陰之光盛者也。然居初、三之間，而近不相得 ... 夫以光盛之陰，處於二陽之間，近而不相得，能無見侵乎 — a bright yielding line, correct, central, answering to the fifth place, and squeezed between two firm neighbors that do not get along with it. The loss is not a robbery by an enemy; it is encroachment by proximity. He adds why the text says 婦 rather than 女: 稱「婦」者，以明自有夫，而它人侵之也 — she is called a wife to make clear that she has a husband and someone else is intruding.

The instruction is 勿逐, do not chase, and 王弼's reasoning is a small theory of how stolen standing behaves: 夫以中道執乎貞正，而見侵者，眾之所助也 ... 竊之者逃竄而莫之歸矣。量斯勢也，不過七日，不須已逐，而自得也 — someone who holds the middle way and keeps to what is correct, and is encroached on, is helped by everyone; the thief runs with nowhere to arrive, and the thing comes back on its own inside seven days. The small image agrees, and the reason it gives is 以中道也 — the middle way is held.

The phrase 七日得 occurs in one other line in the book, 震 六二, with the same closing words, 勿逐，七日得; 七日 also appears in the judgment of Hexagram 24, 復, as 七日來復. The tradition reads seven as a round — the cycle that returns — rather than as a deadline. What the line actually asks is the hardest available behavior for someone who has just been robbed of a marker: hold the center, do not litigate, and let the position do the recovering.

九三：高宗伐鬼方，三年克之，小人勿用。 Gāo zōng fá guǐ fāng, sān nián kè zhī, xiǎo rén wù yòng. The High Ancestor campaigns against the Gui region; three years, and it is taken. The small man is not to be employed.

The 疏 identifies the figure and the tone in one breath: 高宗者，殷王武丁之號也 ... 居文明之終，履得其位，是居衰末，而能濟者也 — the High Ancestor is the title of Wu Ding of Yin, and the line stands at the end of the bright trigram, correctly placed, a capable line in a used-up time. Then the cost: 德實文明，而勢甚衰憊，不能即勝，三年乃克 — the virtue is real and the strength is exhausted, so it cannot win at once, and it takes three years. The small image does not praise the victory. It gives one character for it: 三年克之，憊也 — spent.

鬼方 and 三年 occur in exactly two places in the book's judgments and line texts, and they are here and in 未濟 九四: 震用伐鬼方，三年有賞于大國. The last two figures of the classic remember the same war, from opposite sides of the crossing — one winning it at the end of strength, the other being rewarded for it. 小人勿用 appears in one other line, 師 上六, at the moment a victorious army is being handed back to civilian order.

六四：繻有衣袽，終日戒。 Rú yǒu yī rú, zhōng rì jiè. Soaked through, with rags to plug the leak: on guard the whole day.

This is the line that explains the figure, and it turns on a graph. 王弼's note begins with a correction: 繻宜曰濡，衣袽，所以塞舟漏也 — 繻 should be read as 濡, soaked, and 衣袽 are the rags used to stop a leak in a boat. Read that way the sentence is not about clothing at all; readings that take 繻 as fine silk produce a line about good clothes going to rags, and 王弼 redirects the whole thing to a hull with water in it. His situation for the line is social, not nautical: 履得其正，而近不與三、五相得 — correctly placed, and unable to get along with either of its neighbors. Then the boat: 夫有隙之棄舟，而得濟者，有衣袽也。鄰於不親，而得全者，終日戒也 — a boat with a gap in it still gets across if there are rags; a line with unfriendly neighbors still comes through whole if it spends the day on guard. The 疏 makes it a picture: 如在舟而漏矣 — as if in a boat that leaks.

The small image names the reason: 終日戒，有所疑也 — it is on guard all day because it suspects something, and the suspicion is not paranoia; it is the correct reading of a seam that does not fit.

九五：東鄰殺牛，不如西鄰之禴祭，實受其福。 Dōng lín shā niú, bù rú xī lín zhī yuè jì, shí shòu qí fú. The eastern neighbors kill an ox; it is not equal to the thin offering of the west — that is the one that really receives the blessing.

王弼 sets the two offerings against each other and then discounts the bigger one: 牛，祭之盛者也。禴，祭之薄者也 ... 其所務者，祭祀而已。祭祀之盛，莫盛脩德 — an ox is the fullest offering and 禴 the thinnest, and since there is nothing left to acquire in this figure, what is left to attend to is the rite, and the richest rite is the cultivation of character. He then quotes the line that carries the argument: 黍稷非馨，明德惟馨 — it is not the grain that smells sweet to the spirits; it is character. The 疏 fills in the small print: 禴，殷春祭之名，祭之薄者也, the thin offering is the spring sacrifice of Yin; 苟能脩德，雖薄可饗, thin is enough if the person is real; and it notes that the quotation 王弼 used there, 沼沚之毛，蘋蘩之菜，可羞於鬼神, is abridged from the 左傳.

The small image makes the criterion explicit and it is not quantity: 東鄰殺牛，不如西鄰之時也 — what the west has that the east does not is timing; 王弼's gloss: 在於合時，不在於豐也, it lies in fitting the moment, not in abundance. The second half of the small image turns the blessing outward: 實受其福，吉大來也, and the 疏 adds that the good fortune is not confined to the person: 非惟當身，福流後世.

The word 祭 occurs in exactly two line texts in the whole book, this one and 困 九五; 禴 occurs in three places, here and the second lines of 升 and 萃. The line is the ethical center of the figure: in the one arrangement where everything is in its place, the person who is actually answered is not the one spending the most.

上六：濡其首，厲。 Rú qí shǒu, lì. The head goes under: peril.

王弼 reads the top of a completed figure as the first moment of the next one: 處既濟之極，既濟道窮，則之於未濟 ... 過惟不巳，則遇於難，故濡其首也。將沒不久，危莫先焉 — at the extreme of completion the way of completion runs out and passes into incompletion, and there it is the first to run into the difficulty; whoever keeps going meets it, so the head goes under, and nothing is closer than drowning. The small image asks the only question left: 濡其首，厲，何可久也 — how could this last?

Two details do real work here. The first is that the verdict is 厲, peril, not 凶, misfortune: after four lines that carry no verdict at all — the second through the fifth say only what happens — the figure ends on a warning rather than a sentence. The second is that this line's three opening characters reappear at 未濟 上九, 濡其首，有孚失是, so the water that comes over the head at the end of the complete figure is the same water that closes the book. Taken with 王弼's note on the other figure — 未濟之始，始於既濟之上六也 — the last line of Hexagram 63 is not an ending; it is the doorway to the last page.

It is worth stating the overall verdict profile of this figure, because it is unusual and easy to get wrong. In its six line texts there is no 吉 and no 凶 at all: one 无咎, at the first line, and one 厲, at the last. The 吉 of the judgment sits in 初吉, and the good fortune of the fifth line appears only in the small image, 吉大來也. Checked across all sixty-four, exactly two figures have line texts containing neither word, this one and Hexagram 20, 觀. The most perfectly ordered figure in the classic hands out almost nothing.

Daily Life

The figure's central instruction is a change of work rather than a change of direction, and it is easiest to see in systems that have just started working. A launch that lands, a household that has found its routine, a body that has recovered, a project that has stopped requiring heroics — in each case the job that follows is not more building. It is 思患而豫防: name the specific failure while it is still cheap, and buy the specific rag. 六四 shows where to look. The leak is never at the strength; it is at the seam where two functions are supposed to fit and do not get along — 近不與三、五相得. Anyone who has maintained anything recognizes the line: the part that fails first is the one that was correct and isolated.

The second half of that discipline is the 憊 of 九三. A campaign that takes three years and ends in a real victory leaves the winner exhausted, and the temptation at that exact moment is to staff the peace with whoever is cheapest. The line's advice is blunt and it is about hiring more than about war: 小人勿用. The small image does not say the victory was wrong. It says what it cost, and it puts the cost in one character so nobody can pretend not to have heard it.

There are two smaller instructions worth keeping. The first is the 勿逐 of 六二: when a marker of standing is taken by someone close rather than by an enemy, chasing it is what converts a theft into a feud. The middle way recovers it inside a cycle, and the seven days are not a promise about the calendar — they are the figure's way of saying that a position held correctly does its own recovering while a position defended by pursuit becomes the fight it was afraid of. The second is the fifth line's arithmetic: an ox against a thin spring offering, and the thin one is answered because it arrived at the right time. Most of what people spend to be seen is spent at the wrong moment, and the figure treats the surplus as evidence of the error rather than as generosity.

The last line is the one to carry out of the page. There is no water above the top of a completed figure, so anyone standing there eventually gets wet; the only available move is to come down while there is still something under the feet. That is what 未濟 is for, and the classic is honest enough to end on it.

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