Hexagram 64: Wei Ji （未济） — Before Completion

The Judgment （卦辞）

Before Completion. Success. The small fox, when it has almost crossed, wets its tail. Nothing is favorable.

ExplainedTo cross is to succeed, and before completion is not to have crossed. The sequence says that the ten thousand things cannot be exhausted, and so it ends with Before Completion: whoever has landed, having become a sage, must return again to the sea of birth and death, coming back as a common person and returning by vow to draw others out. The image is fire and water in disorder, spirit and body each in the wrong place, the spirit occupied by the body's desires and filled with them. Water is the water of desire and fire the fire of emotion: when desire is great the emotion is great, and desire flooding and emotion out of control is the cause of the uncompleted - in life, in work, in marriage, in raising children. Yet there is still success: though the conditions are poor, Heaven never shuts a man out and one may go with the current. The small fox, when it has almost crossed, wets its tail: the small fox is impulsive, seeing an advantage and plunging in, and after a few strokes its tail fills with water and it sinks, gaining nothing. Most modern people live exactly so, ruled by desire and impulse.

Tuan Zhuan — Commentary on the Judgment （彖传）

Before Completion, success: the yielding attains the middle. The small fox, when it has almost crossed: it has not yet come out of the middle. It wets its tail, nothing is favorable: it does not continue to the end. Though the places are not right, the firm and the yielding respond.

ExplainedBefore Completion, success, for the yielding attains the middle: the way to success is the middle, and even the soft and small, and not only the firm noble one, may attain the central and correct place. To attain the middle is to hold the center unbiased and to keep it through to the end, and then without warring against emotion and desire the uncompleted is reversed into success, for the middle is itself the lifeboat. The small fox has not come out of the middle: it does not hold the middle but relies on its own courage, and so wets its tail, gains nothing, and does not continue to the end, so that even a momentary success collapses at last. Though the places are not right, the firm and yielding respond: not one line is in its place and the whole body is disordered, and yet the firm and the yielding answer each other, which means that Heaven loves the sinner, the firm being the sages and the Lord and the yielding the utterly lost. The sinner's turning is in a single instant, and the way of the uncompleted is redemption: having no means of his own, he must seize the lifeboat of the middle.

Xiang Zhuan — Image Commentary （大象）

Fire over water: Before Completion. The gentleman is careful to distinguish things and to keep his place.

ExplainedFire over water: water cannot put out the fire. When one cannot control desire and emotion, one must distinguish carefully and hold one's ground. To distinguish things is to choose carefully whom to befriend and to tell right from wrong, for all people have the sense of right and wrong, and a single moment of care sets it working. To keep one's place is to stand firm in benevolence and rightness - benevolence is loving-kindness and rightness is giving - never losing love and never forgetting to give, toward people, toward nature, toward animals and plants. In such an age the gentleman must be even more careful, or he will be drawn in while trying to draw others out.

The Six Lines （六爻）

The lines are read from the bottom upward. Each carries its own text, a Small Image commentary, and a plain-English reading.