A hexagram about drawing near to something with the power to affect it. Approach describes strength that is still increasing, and the Judgement attaches a deadline to it in the same breath as the encouragement.
Nineteenth in the King Wen order, and one of the twelve waxing and waning hexagrams, where it marks the twelfth month. The Sequence places it after Work on What Has Been Spoiled: once there are tasks to do, something can become great.
The Judgement: Approach. Great success from the beginning. It is worth staying correct. When the eighth month comes, there will be misfortune.
The final clause is a timing warning, and it is one of the few places in the book where the text puts a limit on its own good news. It belongs to the calendrical scheme that assigns this figure to the twelfth month, with two yang lines rising from the bottom. Eight months on, the balance has reversed. Commentators disagree about which hexagram that lands on, with Retreat and Contemplation both defended, and the disagreement is old. What survives the dispute is the structure of the warning: this is a favourable position with an expiry.
The Image: the earth above the lake. Approach. The noble person teaches without running out of patience, and protects the people without limit.
Earth standing over water is the picture of a bank above a lake, ground that touches what it contains without pressing on it. The Xiang draws two things from that, and both are about capacity rather than action: inexhaustible teaching, boundless tolerance. It is a notably passive prescription for a hexagram whose name means to approach. The point appears to be that the approach described is not an advance on someone. It is the position of the thing that holds the water, which does its work by being there.
Approach describes a position that is getting stronger. Two yang lines have arrived at the bottom of the figure and four yin lines sit above them, and in the traditional reading the strong lines are advancing upward. This is one of the twelve hexagrams the commentators arranged around the year, and it marks the point where growth has become unmistakable but is nowhere near finished.
In practice it describes drawing near to something you have power over. A person taking on responsibility for others, a project reaching the point where it affects people who did not choose it, a role where your attention has started to matter to somebody else. The name works in both directions and the classical readings exploit that: you approach, and you are approached.
The hexagram is favourable and almost every line says so, which makes the eighth-month clause in the Judgement stand out more than it otherwise would. Growth here is real and it is also a phase. What the question changes is who holds the power. Asked by the person approaching, this describes an opening and a limit on it. Asked by the person being approached, it describes someone drawing nearer whose interest is genuine and whose position is strengthening. Compare Contemplation, the same figure inverted, where the watching is done from above and nobody moves.
In a relationship question Approach usually describes someone moving closer with real intent. The two strong lines at the base of the figure are advancing, and the four yielding lines above are not resisting. It is one of the more straightforwardly warm hexagrams.
Two things qualify it. The first is the timing clause: the text is explicit that this configuration does not hold indefinitely, which reads less as a warning about the relationship than about the window for acting on it. The second is the third line, sweet approach, which the text marks as bringing no advantage. Charm that is doing the work of substance is named. Where the question is about someone else's approach, the hexagram describes movement toward you and says nothing about what it becomes.
At work Approach is the promotion into responsibility for other people, or the point at which what you do starts landing on colleagues rather than only on you. The hexagram treats this as favourable and spends most of its line texts on how to conduct it.
The fifth line is the useful one for anyone managing. It describes a wise approach, fitting for a great ruler, and it is a yielding line in the ruler's place: authority that does not do the work itself. The third line is the counterpart warning, about approaching people pleasantly instead of properly. Between them the hexagram sketches a fairly specific management position, which is that the job is judgement about people rather than effort on tasks.
In money questions Approach describes a position that is improving and has not finished improving. Income rising, a business gaining ground, a debt shrinking on a schedule that is working.
The eighth-month clause is the whole of the hexagram's contribution here, and it is about phase rather than about any specific number. Conditions that are currently favourable are described by this figure as a stage, not a state. That is a general observation about growth and not advice about what to do with money, which the text is not in a position to give. What the hexagram does support is making the decisions that need favourable conditions while the conditions are favourable, rather than after.
Do the thing that requires goodwill now rather than later. The hexagram's one warning is about timing, not about conduct: the position you currently hold is described as strengthening and temporary. Identify the single request, conversation or commitment that would be easier this month than in six months, and make it this week. Waiting is the only failure mode this figure specifies.
A yang line in the bottom place, a yang position, so it is correctly placed. It is the first of the two advancing strong lines. The text: approach together. Correct persistence brings good fortune.
The character rendered as together is read two ways by the commentators, as all or as influence, and both readings survive in English versions. Either way the line describes an advance made in company rather than alone, with the qualification that it stay correct. Changing this line gives The Army, which is what an advance looks like when it becomes organised.
A yang line in the second place, which is a yin position, so it is incorrectly placed, and yet it holds the centre of the lower trigram and corresponds to the yielding fifth line above. The text repeats the first line and then goes further: approach together. Good fortune. Nothing that does not further.
That last phrase is close to the strongest endorsement the book gives, and it is attached to a line that is technically in the wrong place. The correspondence with the ruling line above it is doing the work. Position matters less here than relationship.
A yin line in the third place, a yang position, so it is incorrectly placed, and the two strong lines have just pushed past it. The text: sweet approach. Nothing furthers. Once there is concern about it, no blame.
Sweet here means ingratiating. This is the only unfavourable line in the hexagram, and the remedy offered is remarkably mild: simply worrying about the problem removes the blame. The text is describing someone in a weak position managing it with charm, and it says that noticing you are doing it is most of the correction.
A yin line in the fourth place, a yin position, correctly placed, and directly above the lower trigram where it meets the advancing strong lines first. It also corresponds to the yang line at the bottom. The text is four characters: complete approach. No blame.
The brevity is doing something. Where the third line manages its position with sweetness, this one is simply in the right place, adjacent to what is arriving and correctly aligned with the line at the base. No effort is described because none is needed. It is the least dramatic line in the hexagram.
A yin line in the fifth place, a yang position, so it is incorrectly placed, and it is the ruling line, central in the upper trigram, corresponding to the strong second line below. The text: wise approach. Fitting for a great ruler. Good fortune.
A yielding ruler with a strong subordinate in correspondence is one of the most favourable arrangements in the book, and this line is the clearest example of it. What the text calls wisdom is structural: the ruler does not act, the second line does, and the relationship between them is what produces the good fortune.
A yin line in the top place, a yin position, correctly placed, and furthest from the two strong lines at the bottom. The text: generous approach. Good fortune. No blame.
The top line of a hexagram is usually the one that has gone too far, and this is one of the exceptions. Distance from the advancing lines does not weaken it. The word rendered as generous carries a sense of thickness or solidity, and the commentators read this as approach from someone with nothing left to gain by it, which is why it is favourable.
Dui, the lake, sits below Kun, the earth. Ground above water: the bank of a lake seen from the water's side, earth that meets what it holds without weighing on it. The two trigrams give the hexagram its double sense, because a bank both approaches the water and is approached by it.
The figure is one of the twelve the Han commentators arranged around the solar year, and its place in that scheme explains the Judgement's timing clause. Two yang lines have entered at the bottom and are read as rising. Growth is the structural fact, not a mood.
The nuclear hexagram is Hexagram 24, Return, which is the same figure one stage earlier: a single yang line at the base. What the nuclear reveals is that Approach is not a new development. It is the second step of something that already turned, and the surface figure takes credit for momentum that started before it. The inverse is Contemplation and the opposite is Retreat, and both of those are figures where the advance has stopped.
The oracle layer here is Zhou divination material from roughly the eleventh to eighth centuries BCE, and the line statements are short even by the standards of that layer. Several are four characters long. The word lin means to look down on, to oversee, to come near from a position above, and it is used in early texts for a superior visiting subordinates. The English title Approach loses the vertical sense the Chinese has.
The eighth-month clause is the most argued-over sentence in the hexagram. It depends on the scheme that pairs twelve hexagrams with twelve months, and that scheme is Han dynasty material, considerably later than the oracle text it is being used to explain. Whether the original clause meant anything calendrical is genuinely unknown, and readings that present the twelfth-month assignment as the meaning of the line are presenting a commentary as the text.
The Ten Wings supplied the Judgement and Image commentaries and the Sequence, which places Approach after Work on What Has Been Spoiled. Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi reworked it in the Song period, and English readers meet it through Legge in 1882 and Wilhelm in German in 1924.
Approach is regularly read as a promise that things are about to get better, and the eighth-month clause is dropped because it spoils the mood. That clause is in the Judgement, which is the oldest and most authoritative part of the entry. A hexagram that says great success and then names a point at which the success stops is making a claim about phase, and reporting only the first half is not a simplification. It is a different reading.
The second misreading is directional. Because the English name suggests moving toward something, the hexagram gets read as advice to make an approach. The Chinese word has a vertical sense the translation loses: it is what a superior does when visiting subordinates. Read that way, most drawings of this figure are describing a position of power rather than a courtship, and the line texts, which are largely about how to hold authority well, make much more sense.
The third is the eighth month itself. Readers reach for a literal timeline, and the calendrical scheme it rests on is Han material laid over a much older text. Treating it as a forecast of when something ends is using a late commentary as a clock.
Put a real question to the coins.