Mountain below, water above: an obstacle with a hazard beyond it. Obstruction describes a difficulty that is genuinely external, and four of its six lines say exactly the same thing about it.
Thirty-ninth in the King Wen order. The Sequence places it after Opposition: people at cross purposes run into difficulty, and jian is difficulty of the kind you have to walk through rather than around.
Legge's 1882 English: advantage will be found in the south-west and the contrary in the north-east, it will be advantageous to meet the great man, and being firm and correct in this way brings good fortune.
The directions are doing real work rather than decorating the sentence. Southwest in this book belongs to Kun, to level ground and to company; northeast belongs to Gen, mountain and isolation. The judgement is saying, in the geography available to it, go where the ground is easier and where there are people, and do not go further into the rough country. Then it names the one resource that helps, which is somebody more capable than you are.
The Image is water on a mountain, and from it the noble person turns round, examines himself, and works on his own character.
The picture is a real hazard: a stream on a steep slope, where the footing is bad and the water is going somewhere you are not. What the Image recommends in response is not a route but a reversal of attention. Faced with an obstruction it does not counsel pushing, going round, or waiting. It says turn and look at yourself. That is either the deepest advice in the book or an evasion, depending on the situation, and the hexagram will not tell you which one you are in.
Obstruction is mountain below with water above: something in the way, and beyond it a hazard. It is one of the few figures in the book whose difficulty is unambiguously external. The querent has not caused this and cannot dissolve it by changing their attitude toward it.
The text is unusually repetitive, and the repetition is the content. Four of the six lines say the same thing: advancing leads to greater difficulty, and staying put is praiseworthy. A book that generally prefers ambivalence spends most of one hexagram saying stop, which is worth taking seriously as an instruction rather than as a mood.
Its structure is a good deal better than its subject. Five of six lines are correctly placed, and the second and fifth are correct, central and answering each other, which is why the fifth line has friends arriving. The obstruction is real and the people are in the right positions. Its opposite, line for line, is Hexagram 38, Opposition, where the difficulty sits between people rather than in front of them. Asked what to do, this figure says wait and get help. Asked how long for, it does not say, and that silence is the hardest part of living with this figure.
An external obstacle to a relationship: distance, circumstance, illness, other people's decisions, timing. Obstruction is specifically not about two people being wrong for each other, and that distinction is why it matters in a relationship reading.
Its instruction is unwelcome and consistent. Do not push. Four lines say that pressing forward makes the difficulty larger, and one says that stopping and returning to your own people is the correct move. The fifth line is the exception worth noting: the greatest difficulty, and friends arriving. Under this hexagram the thing that changes a situation is other people, and the useful action is asking rather than trying harder on your own.
A blocked situation with a cause outside the querent: a hiring freeze, a market, a regulator, a decision made somewhere they have no access to. This hexagram is careful that the difficulty is not a personal failing, which is worth saying plainly, because people under obstruction routinely assume that it is.
The advice is to stop advancing and find somebody more capable. The judgement names meeting the great man as the specific advantage, and in a work context that is straightforwardly about seniority, expertise and access. The Image adds self-examination, which is useful and can become a trap, because a difficulty that is genuinely external does not get fixed by improving yourself.
A financial blockage with an external cause: a payment that will not come, a market that has closed, a cost imposed by somebody else. The hexagram describes conditions the querent did not create.
Its instruction is not to force it. Under this figure additional effort in the same direction produces more difficulty, and the recommended resources are time and other people. The judgement's advice to seek out the more capable person is the practical part, and in a money question that usually means proper professional advice rather than another attempt. Nothing here amounts to advice about any particular decision.
Stop advancing, and ask somebody better placed than you for help, by name, this week. Four of the six lines in this hexagram say that pushing makes it worse, and the judgement names one resource that works, which is a more capable person. Write down who that is in your situation and what specifically you would ask them for. The Image's self-examination can wait until after you have made the request.
Advancing leads to greater difficulty; remaining where you are earns praise. The figure opens by telling you not to move.
The line is the only incorrectly placed one in the hexagram, yin in a yang position, with no answering line at the fourth. Weak, wrongly placed and unsupported at the bottom is the worst position in the figure, and the instruction follows from it exactly. This is not patience as a virtue. It is patience as the only available option. Changing it produces Hexagram 63, After Completion.
The king's minister struggling with difficulty piled on difficulty, and not for his own advantage. It is the only line in the hexagram that keeps going, and the text takes care to say why.
The line is correct, central, and answers the ruler at the fifth. It has both the placement and the relationship, which is what makes persistence appropriate here where it is wrong everywhere else in the figure. The qualification about advantage matters: this is duty rather than ambition. Changing it produces Hexagram 48, The Well.
Advancing brings greater difficulty. He stays where he is and returns to his own people. The same instruction as the first line, with a destination attached to it.
The line is correctly placed and strong at the top of the lower trigram, which is the position most tempted to push through into the danger above. What the text gives it instead is a direction backwards, toward the people it came from. Retreat here is social rather than spatial. Changing it produces Hexagram 8, Holding Together.
Advancing brings greater difficulty. He stays where he is and joins with the line above him. Again the same instruction, with a different solution attached.
The line is correctly placed but has no answering line at the first, so its support cannot come from below. It allies upward instead, with the fifth. This is the third of four lines saying stop, and each differs in where it turns for company, which is the actual content of the repetition. Changing it produces Hexagram 31, Influence.
The greatest difficulty of all, and friends are coming. It is the hardest line in the hexagram and the only one where help arrives.
The reason is structural. This line is correct, central, in the ruler's seat, and answered by the correct central line at the second, which is the minister who kept going. The help is not luck. It is the second line arriving. A figure about obstruction puts its heaviest burden and its only rescue in exactly the same place. Changing it gives Hexagram 15, Modesty.
Going forward increases the difficulty; staying achieves merit. Good fortune, and it is advantageous to meet the great man. This is the fourth and final statement of the same instruction.
The top line is correctly placed and answers the third. It is past the obstruction and could leave, and the text tells it to stay and repeats the judgement's advice about finding the more capable person. Even at the top of the figure the resource is somebody else. Changing it produces Hexagram 53, Development.
Obstruction is 001010. Gen, the Mountain Trigram, is below and Kan, the Water Trigram, is above: a stop, and beyond it a hazard. Both are difficult trigrams, which is rare, and it is why the figure has no easy direction anywhere in it.
Five of the six lines are correctly placed and only the first is not. More importantly, the second and fifth are correct, central and answering each other, which is the strongest configuration this system has. The obstruction really is external. The figure itself is well ordered and the trouble is all in the terrain.
Turn it upside down and you have Hexagram 40, Deliverance, where the same lines describe the tension breaking. Because inversion flips the correctness of every line at once, Deliverance necessarily carries one correct line where this figure has five, and the pair reads as one situation before and after.
The nuclear figure, from lines two to five, is Hexagram 64, Before Completion. Underneath the blockage is not a resolution but an unfinished state, which is a more honest thing to find there than reassurance.
The Zhou-era line texts here are terse and almost identical to one another, which is itself informative. Four of the six say a version of the same sentence. An oracle that repeats itself that consistently is either describing a situation with only one correct response, or is the work of an editor who thought so.
The southwest and northeast in the judgement belong to the oldest layer of directional thinking in the book, well before the two circular trigram arrangements. The same pairing appears in Hexagram 2, and in both places the southwest is where company and level ground are.
The Ten Wings supply the Image, the trigram reading of water on the mountain, and the recommendation of self-examination, which is the part of this hexagram that reads most like later Confucian moral philosophy and least like a Bronze Age oracle. Legge in 1882 glossed the figure as difficulty. The Chinese carries a sense of lameness, or of walking badly, which is more physical than obstruction and rather more precise. Somebody moving badly over rough ground is a narrower picture than a barrier, and it puts the difficulty in the going rather than in a wall.
The first misreading is taking the Image for the whole hexagram. Turn round and examine yourself is memorable, and it is one line of a figure that spends four lines saying the obstacle is real and in front of you. Applied to a genuinely external difficulty, self-examination becomes a way of making somebody responsible for a situation they did not cause, and this is the hexagram where that error does the most damage.
The second is reading the repetition as emphasis. It is not simply insistence. Each of the four stopping lines differs in what it turns to instead: praise at the first, one's own people at the third, the line above at the fourth, the great man at the sixth. The instruction is uniform and the remedy is not, and the remedy is the useful part.
The third is despair at the fifth line. The greatest difficulty appears there and readers stop at those words. The rest of the line says friends are coming, and the structure says who they are: the second line, the minister who kept going. It is the most hopeful sentence in the hexagram and it sits inside its worst one.
Put a real question to the coins.