Water below, thunder above: the storm breaking. Deliverance describes the moment a tension releases, and almost all of its advice concerns the hours immediately afterwards rather than the relief itself.
Fortieth in the King Wen order. The Sequence places it after Obstruction: nothing stays blocked for ever, and jie is the name for the loosening of whatever was being held fast.
Legge's 1882 English: advantage in the south-west; if nothing further is called for there is good fortune in returning to the old conditions; and if something is called for, there is good fortune in doing it early.
It is a judgement about timing and almost nothing else. The release has happened, and the text's whole concern is the interval that follows. Either the matter is finished, in which case go back to ordinary life quickly, or it is not, in which case act now rather than later. Both branches recommend speed. The window this hexagram describes is narrow, and it closes by drifting rather than by slamming.
The Image is thunder and rain both breaking, and from it the noble person forgives errors and deals gently with offences.
The natural picture is the moment the storm actually arrives: the tension in the air discharges and everything is washed at once. What the text draws from it is amnesty, which is a striking move. Deliverance is treated not as a chance to settle accounts but as the point at which accounts stop being settled. The Image is quietly practical about that. A release immediately followed by punishment is not a release, and the tension simply re-forms with the same people inside it.
Deliverance is water below with thunder above: danger underneath and movement breaking out over it. The picture is a storm discharging, and the hexagram concerns the moment of release rather than the difficulty that preceded it.
Almost everything in the text is about the aftermath. The judgement is about how quickly to act, the Image is about forgiveness, the fourth line is about removing something, the fifth about clearing away what is harmful, and the sixth about a single well-aimed shot. Very little of it is relief. This is a hexagram about the work that follows a release, and it assumes that work is where the outcome actually gets decided.
It is also structurally the weakest figure in this stretch: only the top line is correctly placed. That fits. A situation immediately after a break is one where nobody is yet in the right position. Its opposite, line for line, is Hexagram 37, The Family, which is the same material settled and ordered. Asked whether the difficulty has broken, this figure says yes. Asked whether the situation is now stable, it says nothing of the kind, and the difference between those two is where the whole reading sits. Releases and resolutions are not the same event.
A tension in a relationship releasing: an argument ending, a truth finally said, a period of strain breaking. Deliverance is the exhale, and the hexagram is far more interested in the following week than in the moment itself.
The Image is the part to hold onto. Forgive errors, deal gently with offences. Under this figure the temptation immediately after a release is to go back over what happened and establish who was right, and the text is unusually direct that this is what reconstructs the tension. The third line makes the same point in another key: somebody carrying their old burden into new circumstances, visibly, and attracting trouble for it.
A blockage clearing: a decision finally made, a difficult person leaving, a project unfrozen, a dispute settled. The hexagram marks the release rather than the conditions that produced it.
Its advice is operational and comes with a deadline. If nothing further is needed, return to normal work quickly instead of continuing to process the crisis. If something is needed, do it now, while the situation is still moving. The fifth line adds the harder half, clearing away what was harmful, which after a workplace release usually means an arrangement or a habit rather than a person. The window for that is short, and the hexagram says so.
Financial pressure lifting: a debt cleared, a payment arriving, a cost removed, a constraint ending. Deliverance describes the release rather than the position that follows it.
The judgement's timing advice applies here more literally than anywhere else in the figure. If the matter is finished, return to ordinary arrangements promptly rather than continuing to run on emergency terms. If something still needs doing, do it while there is momentum. The characteristic failure after financial relief is keeping the crisis habits or spending the relief at once, and the hexagram warns against drift rather than against either one specifically.
Do the one remaining thing now, this week, or else deliberately go back to normal. The judgement offers exactly those two options and puts a clock on both. Then take the Image seriously and do not use the release to establish who was at fault. Whatever you were going to say about how the difficulty came about, this is the week not to say it, and next month it will not need saying.
No blame. Two characters in the Chinese, and among the shortest line statements anywhere in the book.
The brevity is the content. The line is weak and incorrectly placed at the bottom of a figure where the crisis has just broken, and it answers the strong fourth. It has done nothing, and it is being told that nothing is required of it. In a hexagram whose other five lines are all about action, the first is permitted simply to stop, which is a real reading and easy to overlook. Changing it produces Hexagram 54, The Marrying Maiden.
Catching three foxes in the hunt and taking the yellow arrows. Firm correctness brings good fortune. Yellow is the colour of the centre in this book, and the line is in fact central.
The foxes are usually read as the flatterers, or the concealed problems that survive a change of conditions. What the line describes is not the release but the clearing out that follows it, done by somebody with the standing to do it: incorrectly placed but central, and answering the ruler above. Changing it produces Hexagram 16, Enthusiasm.
A porter still carrying his load while riding in a carriage. He attracts robbers. However correct he tries to be, there will be regret.
The image is precise and slightly comic: somebody whose circumstances have improved and whose habits have not, advertising the mismatch. The line is weak, wrongly placed, and has no answering line at the sixth, so nothing holds it in position. Deliverance without a change of behaviour is the failure this line describes. Changing it produces Hexagram 32, Duration.
Remove your toes, and friends will come whom you can trust. Legge's phrasing is obscure; the sense is the removal of something attached to you and close.
The line is strong and wrongly placed, answering the weak first line, and the text asks it to detach from that connection before the useful alliances can arrive. It is the least comfortable instruction in the hexagram, because what is being removed is not an enemy but an attachment. Changing it produces Hexagram 7, The Army.
The noble person clears away what is harmful, good fortune follows, and even the small men are convinced. That last clause is the point: the removal is confirmed by the people least likely to approve of it.
The line is soft in the ruler's seat, incorrectly placed but central, and it answers the second line that caught the foxes. The ruler does not do the catching. The pairing does the work and the fifth supplies the authority. Changing it gives Hexagram 47, Oppression.
A prince shoots a falcon from the top of a high wall and hits it. Advantageous in every way. It is the only correctly placed line in the hexagram and the only unqualified good outcome in it.
The Great Treatise comments on this line directly, and its point is preparation: the instrument is readied first, the moment is waited for, and then a single shot settles the matter. After a release, one accurate action beats a great deal of activity. Changing it produces Hexagram 64, Before Completion.
Deliverance is 010100. Kan, the Water Trigram, is below and Zhen, the Thunder Trigram, is above: danger underneath, movement breaking out over it. The storm is discharging rather than gathering.
Only the sixth line is correctly placed. Five of six sit wrongly, which makes this the least well-arranged figure in this stretch of the sequence and an accurate picture of the moment after a break. Nothing has settled into position yet, and the one line that is correct is the last, where the falcon is hit.
Turn the figure over and you have Hexagram 39, Obstruction, with five correct lines: the same situation before the release, well arranged and going nowhere. Because inversion flips the correctness of every line at once, that five-and-one split is guaranteed by arithmetic rather than by meaning. Which line escapes is not guaranteed, and here it is the top one.
The nuclear figure, from lines two to five, is Hexagram 63, After Completion, where every line is in place. Underneath a messy release sits the figure of everything being finished, which is what this hexagram is working toward and has not reached.
The Zhou-era material here is hunting and weapons: three foxes, yellow arrows, a falcon on a wall, a porter and robbers. It is a set of concrete scenes rather than a doctrine of release, and the sense of deliverance as a spiritual condition is not in the line texts at all.
The sixth line has an unusual afterlife. The Great Treatise, one of the Ten Wings, quotes it and expands on it, using the falcon and the bow to argue that a person prepares the instrument and waits for the moment rather than acting out of urgency. It is one of the few places where an early commentary tells you explicitly how to read a specific line, and the reading has held for two thousand years.
The Image's amnesty belongs to the Ten Wings layer as well, and it is the part that has aged best. Forgiving errors and dealing gently with offences is a Warring States or Han addition to a Zhou hunting text, and it is a considerable improvement on what it was added to. Legge in 1882 gave the title as loosening or removing. Deliverance came later and carries rather more rescue in it than the Chinese does.
The first misreading is relief. The name promises rescue and the hexagram is almost entirely about work: foxes to be caught, attachments to be removed, harm to be cleared, one shot to be taken. The release is the premise of the figure rather than its subject, and a reading that stops at the good news has stopped at the first line of the story.
The second is missing the deadline. Both branches of the judgement recommend speed, and the characteristic way this hexagram fails is not disaster but drift: the crisis ends, nobody returns to normal, nobody does the outstanding thing, and the emergency arrangements quietly become permanent ones.
The third is using the release to settle accounts. The Image says forgive errors and deal gently with offences, and it says it about the exact moment when a person finally has the standing to do the opposite. That instruction is not softness. It is the observation that a deliverance followed by a reckoning is not a deliverance, and the third line, the porter still carrying his load in the carriage, is what that looks like from outside.
Put a real question to the coins.