A hexagram about inherited damage. Work on What Has Been Spoiled describes a situation that decayed slowly, through neglect rather than malice, and it treats repairing it as ordinary work rather than as rescue.
Eighteenth in the King Wen order. The Sequence commentary reads gu as tasks and places it after Following, on the reasoning that whoever follows others gladly ends up with work to do.
The Judgement: Work on what has been spoiled. Great success from the beginning. It is worth crossing the great water. Three days before the turning point, three days after it.
The last clause is the odd one. It refers to the first of the ten heavenly stems in the Chinese calendar, and the standard reading is that you should study a situation for a set period before acting and for a set period afterwards. That is unusually procedural for this text. The hexagram treats repair as a job with a method rather than as a moment of resolve, and the promise of success is attached to the method, not to good intentions.
The Image: wind at the foot of the mountain. Work on what has been spoiled. The noble person rouses the people and nourishes their character.
The picture is wind blocked by a mountain, circling in the space underneath instead of passing through. Air that cannot move goes stale, and the hexagram's name is written with a character showing insects in a vessel. Stagnation is the mechanism the whole figure describes. What the Xiang recommends is not repair of the thing but repair of the people around it, which is a different and slower prescription than the Judgement's. The two halves of the classical text do not entirely agree.
Work on What Has Been Spoiled describes a mess that was not made deliberately. The character at the centre of the hexagram shows insects breeding in a covered dish: something left alone too long. That is the specific kind of damage this figure is about. Not a disaster, not sabotage, but the accumulated result of nobody attending to something for years.
Four of the six lines describe repairing what a parent spoiled, and the hexagram is the book's clearest statement about inherited problems. A business run the same way since the founder, a family arrangement nobody has questioned, a codebase, a habit, a set of expectations installed by someone who is no longer around to defend them. The text is remarkably unsentimental about this. It does not ask you to blame the person who caused it, and it does not excuse you from the work.
The Judgement calls the repair a great water worth crossing, which is the text's phrase for a substantial undertaking rather than a tidy-up. What the question changes is which end you are standing at. Asked by the person who inherited the mess, this describes work that is legitimate and difficult. Asked by the person who made it, the fourth line is the relevant one, and it is about the cost of continuing to leave it. Compare Following, which is this figure inverted and describes the easy adaptation that, left long enough, produces exactly this.
In a relationship question this describes a problem that has been there a long time and was never addressed. Not a rupture. A pattern: the same argument for six years, a division of labour nobody agreed to out loud, an expectation one person brought from their own family.
The line texts about setting right what a parent spoiled are unusually literal here. A great deal of what goes wrong between two people was learned somewhere else and imported. The hexagram treats this as repairable and says the repair takes method and time. What it does not do is locate fault, and a reading that uses it to establish whose family was worse has missed the point of a figure whose whole subject is the work rather than the cause.
At work this is the inherited system. The process that made sense under a previous structure, the account managed the same way for a decade, the documentation nobody has opened since the person who wrote it left. It is the hexagram of the new arrival who can see what everyone else has stopped noticing.
The text is favourable and specific about method. Study it before you touch it, and study it again after you start. The most common failure in this position is not incompetence but speed: arriving, identifying the problem, and moving before understanding why the arrangement survived. Things persist for reasons, and the reasons are usually people. The fifth line, which describes repair that earns praise, is the one where the work was done without a fight.
In money questions this describes an arrangement that has quietly decayed. A policy taken out years ago and never reviewed, an account paying a rate that was competitive once, a recurring cost attached to something that stopped existing.
The hexagram is not describing loss. It is describing neglect, which is a different thing and usually a smaller one, though it compounds. The text's advice is procedural rather than financial: examine the thing before you change it and after. This hexagram cannot tell you whether any particular arrangement is good, and nothing here is a recommendation about what to do with money. What it identifies is that something has gone unexamined long enough for the examination itself to be the task.
Pick the oldest unexamined arrangement you are responsible for and spend one hour finding out how it actually works before you change anything about it. The Judgement is explicit that the study comes before the action and continues after it. Most failures at this hexagram are not failures of will. They are people who saw the problem clearly and moved on it a week too early.
A yin line in the bottom place, which is a yang position, so it is weak and incorrectly placed: the least equipped line in the figure, and the first to be handed the job. The text: setting right what the father spoiled. Where there is a son, the dead father is without blame. Danger, and good fortune in the end.
The clause about the father is doing something specific. Repairing the damage retrospectively clears the person who caused it, which is a claim about reputation rather than about repair. Changing this line gives The Taming Power of the Great.
A yang line in the second place, a yin position, so it is incorrectly placed, though it holds the central position of the lower trigram. The text: setting right what the mother spoiled. One must not persist rigidly.
This is the only line that names the mother, and it is the only one told to soften. Whether that reflects Zhou family structure is not recoverable from the text. What is usable is the instruction: some inherited problems get worse under a direct correction, and this line marks the case where firmness is the wrong tool.
A yang line in the third place, a yang position, so it is correctly placed, but the third place is the top of the lower trigram and structurally unstable. The text: setting right what the father spoiled. A little remorse. No great blame.
A strong line in a strong place at an exposed point produces exactly what the text reports: the job gets done, somewhat too forcefully, and the damage from the overcorrection is real but minor. This is the most ordinary line in the hexagram and the most recognisable. Slight regret, no lasting harm.
A yin line in the fourth place, a yin position, so it is correctly placed and entirely comfortable, which is the problem. The text: tolerating what the father spoiled. To go on brings humiliation.
This is the only line in the hexagram that does not repair anything. It indulges the damage instead. Note that the line is correctly placed and still gets the worst judgement in the figure. Being in the right position is not the same as doing the right thing, and the text is explicit that the humiliation comes from continuing rather than from the original damage.
A yin line in the fifth place, a yang position, so it is incorrectly placed and yet holds the ruling position at the centre of the upper trigram. The text: setting right what the father spoiled. One meets with praise.
A yielding line in the ruler's place cannot force the repair, and this is the line where the repair goes best. It gets the only unambiguous approval in the hexagram. The structural reading is that authority here works through others rather than directly, which is also the Image commentary's prescription: rouse the people rather than fix the thing yourself.
A yang line in the top place, a yin position, incorrectly placed, and above the ruling line, which in this text usually means outside the structure rather than above it. The text: he does not serve kings and princes; he sets his own affairs higher.
The last line withdraws from the repair entirely. It is not condemned, and it is not praised. The classical commentators read it as the scholar who declines office, and the honest modern reading is that some inherited problems are legitimately not yours. Changing this line gives Pushing Upward.
Xun, wind, sits below Gen, the mountain. Wind that meets a mountain does not pass; it turns back and circles in the space underneath. That is the mechanism the hexagram names: not destruction but circulation that has stopped. In family terms the eldest daughter is under the youngest son, an arrangement the commentators read as generational disorder, which is why the line texts keep returning to what a parent left behind.
The nuclear hexagram, from the inner four lines, is Hexagram 54, The Marrying Maiden, and it is uncomfortable. That figure is about entering a situation in a subordinate position on terms you did not set. Hidden inside a hexagram about repairing inherited damage is a hexagram about being placed somewhere without a say. The surface says do the work; the nuclear says notice that you did not choose it.
Inverse and opposite are the same figure, Hexagram 17. Turn this one upside down and you get Following; change every line and you get Following again. Only eight of the sixty-four have that property, and the pairing is exact: easy adaptation and the decay it eventually produces are the same shape read two ways.
The character gu is older than the hexagram and stranger than the usual translations suggest. It shows insects in a vessel, and in early Chinese texts it refers to a poison prepared from venomous creatures sealed together, to the illness such a poison causes, and to a kind of malign influence. None of the English titles carry that. Work on What Has Been Spoiled is a reasonable gloss of the Ten Wings reading, not of the word.
The oracle layer is Zhou material from roughly the eleventh to eighth centuries BCE, and its line statements are about fathers, mothers and inheritance in a specific aristocratic context. The Ten Wings, assembled in the Warring States and early Han periods and traditionally attributed to Confucius, supplied the ethical frame and the Sequence, which reads gu as affairs or tasks rather than as poison. That reinterpretation is the reason the hexagram now sounds like a management problem.
James Legge translated it in 1882 and Richard Wilhelm into German in 1924. The Sequence commentary places it after Following and before Approach, reasoning that once there are tasks to do, something can become great.
This hexagram is regularly read as a warning that something is rotten and you have not noticed. That is not what it says. The Judgement opens with the same phrase used for the most favourable figures in the book and then tells you the work is worth crossing a great river for. It is an unusually encouraging text attached to an unusually grim name, and readers who take the name and skip the sentence get the mood exactly backwards.
The second misreading is the family one. Four lines mention a father or a mother, and modern readings turn this into a hexagram about your parents. In the Zhou context these are statements about inherited office and estate, not about childhood. The figure applies to anything handed over in a state of neglect, and reading it as a prompt to examine your upbringing narrows a general text into a private one.
The third is the assumption that the repair is yours to make. The top line explicitly declines the job and is not criticised for it. A reading that treats every inherited mess as a duty has ignored the one line in the figure that walks away, and has also ignored the fourth line, which is not about failing to repair but about staying to indulge it.
Put a real question to the coins.