A lake with the water drained out from under it. Hexagram 47 is the book's hexagram of being worn down and hemmed in, and it is unusually honest that nothing the querent does will shorten it.
Forty-seventh in the King Wen order. The Sequence places it after Pushing Upward: rising that does not stop will exhaust itself in the end, and exhaustion is where this hexagram begins.
The text: exhaustion, and still success. Steadiness is what carries a great person through, and there is no blame. Words spoken now will not be believed.
That last clause is the sharpest sentence in this part of the book. It says plainly that in a period of depletion a person's credibility is reduced along with everything else, so explaining yourself will not work and arguing your case will not land. The Judgement is not consoling. It offers only that the situation can be survived with the person intact, and it explicitly withdraws the usual remedy of talking your way out.
A lake with no water in it. The basin is intact and the thing that made it a lake has drained away below.
The commentary draws a single instruction: the person of standing stakes their life on following their will. It is the most severe thing the Image texts say anywhere. In a situation where nothing external can be relied on, what remains is what a person has decided to be, and the Image treats that as the only remaining resource rather than as an inspiring flourish. Nothing here suggests the difficulty is deserved, useful, or about to end.
Hexagram 47 describes exhaustion under confinement. The lower trigram is water and the upper is the lake, so the water that should fill the lake has sunk beneath it: the structure of the thing survives and its substance is gone. That is a precise image of depletion rather than of disaster.
What it covers is the situation where a person's resources, credibility and room to move have all contracted at once. Poverty, illness, a reputation damaged, a job with no exit, a period of grief that has outlasted anybody's patience for it. The line texts are unusually concrete about this: somebody stuck in a tree stump, somebody sitting on thorns, somebody moving slowly in a cart. Nobody in this hexagram is being punished, and nothing in it is presented as a lesson.
What the question does matters more than usual. Asked what is happening, this describes the constraint accurately and does not soften it. Asked what to do, the answer is narrow: hold, and do not expect to be believed. Asked when it ends, the hexagram declines to say, and the honest thing is to decline with it. Its inverse is Hexagram 48, The Well, the same lines turned over, where water is reliably present underground.
In a relationship question this is the stretch where a couple has run out of what it was running on. Not a fight, and often nothing dramatic at all: energy gone, patience gone, the same conversation attempted several times without landing.
The Judgement's clause about words not being believed is the useful part here, and it is unwelcome. In this condition explaining yourself does not repair anything, and both people can be entirely sincere while neither is able to hear it. What the hexagram recommends is holding the shape of the thing without trying to argue it back into life. It says nothing about whether the relationship survives, and a reading that supplies an answer to that has gone past the text.
At work this is the depleted position: a role with no resources, a project starved of what it needs, a person whose standing has fallen for reasons they cannot correct by performing better. The hexagram is accurate about how that feels and refuses to be encouraging about it.
The practical content is the credibility warning. In a period like this, making the case again does not work, and repeated advocacy tends to spend what little standing remains. The tradition's advice is to conserve rather than argue, and to keep doing the work at a level you would defend regardless of whether anybody is watching. That is genuinely all it offers, and pretending otherwise would be inventing.
Money that has run out or is running out: income stopped, reserves consumed, obligations continuing regardless. This is the hexagram of financial constraint, and it describes the experience rather than the arithmetic.
It is not financial advice and it forecasts nothing whatsoever. The one thing the symbolism supports saying is that this condition consumes attention out of proportion to the sums involved, and that decisions made inside it tend to be worse than the same person would make outside it. Anybody in a genuinely difficult financial position needs practical help from somebody qualified to give it, and an oracle is not that.
Stop explaining. The Judgement is explicit that words carry no weight in this period, and the effort of arguing your case is being spent from a reserve that is already low. Decide the one thing you will keep doing regardless of whether anyone notices, and do only that. This hexagram's advice is conservation rather than repair, and it does not pretend the situation is short.
Yin in a yang place, incorrect, at the very bottom. The text has somebody sitting on a tree stump, entering a dark valley, and not being seen for three years.
The stump is a tree that was cut down, so the position is resting on the remains of something that used to be substantial. Three years is the book's formula for a long indefinite period rather than a count. Changing this line gives Hexagram 58, The Joyous, doubled lake, which is the same basin full rather than drained.
Yang in a yin place, incorrect by position but central in the lower trigram. The text describes being worn down amid food and drink, then the arrival of someone in a scarlet sash, and says an offering is appropriate while setting out brings misfortune.
The detail is odd and precise: this exhaustion happens in the middle of plenty. The scarlet sash marks an official, so recognition arrives from outside rather than being sought. Changing the line gives Hexagram 45, Gathering Together, where the isolated position rejoins an assembly.
Yin in a yang place, incorrect, at the top of the lower trigram, and the least fortunate line in the hexagram. The text has somebody hemmed in by stone, leaning on thorns, entering their house and not finding their wife, and calls it misfortune.
Stone and thorns are obstruction in both the hard and the sharp form, and the empty house makes the loss domestic. Commentators read it as difficulty reaching the one place that should have been secure. Changing it gives Hexagram 28, Preponderance of the Great, a structure overloaded past what it can bear.
Yang in a yin place, incorrect, and the first line of the upper trigram. The text describes coming very slowly, hemmed in by a metal carriage, with humiliation, though the matter reaches its end.
The carriage is a means of travel and here it is the constraint, which is the exact experience of being slowed by the thing that was supposed to carry you. The reading is delay rather than failure. Changing it gives Hexagram 29, The Abysmal, doubled water, where the danger is the medium rather than an obstacle in it.
Yang in a yang place, correct, central, and in the ruler's seat. The text is grim even here: the nose and feet are cut off, there is confinement by the man in the purple sash, joy comes slowly, and offerings are appropriate.
Mutilation was a real Zhou punishment, so this describes somebody in authority who has been publicly and permanently marked. Even the ruling line of this hexagram does not escape. Changing it gives Hexagram 40, Deliverance, release from a tension that has been held too long.
The top line, yin in a yin place, correct, and at the end. The text has somebody hemmed in by creeping vines, moving uncertainly, saying that if they act they will regret it, and adds that going forward from here brings good fortune.
Vines are the softest obstruction in the hexagram and the easiest to break, which is the point: what holds this position is largely the expectation of being held. Changing it gives Hexagram 6, Conflict, where the constraint is met with open opposition.
The lower trigram is Kan, water, which is also the trigram of danger and of the pit; the upper is Dui, the lake. Water below the lake means the water has fallen beneath the basin that should contain it. The container remains and the contents have gone, which is the whole of the hexagram's argument about depletion.
The figure alternates awkwardly, and only two of its six lines sit in correct positions. Structurally almost nothing is where it should be, which matches a situation in which effort produces no proportionate result.
The nuclear hexagram is Hexagram 37, The Family, and it is the most humane thing on this page. Inside a figure about being cut off and worn down sits one about household, role and mutual obligation. The reading commentators draw from that is not that family solves the difficulty, but that what remains functional in this condition tends to be the near and domestic rather than the public. Its inverse is Hexagram 48, The Well, and its opposite is Hexagram 22, Grace, where the surface is adorned rather than stripped.
The oracle layer is Western Zhou and unusually harsh. The fifth line's reference to the cutting off of nose and feet is not metaphorical; those were codified mutilating punishments of the period, and their presence is one of the reasons the earliest stratum is read as a record of real circumstances rather than as moral instruction.
The character Kun shows a tree enclosed within a boundary, and it carries the senses of exhaustion, distress, poverty and being hemmed in at once. English has no single word covering that range, which is why translators have variously offered Oppression, Exhaustion, Confining and Adversity. The hexagram is not about oppression in the modern political sense, and that title, inherited from Wilhelm, misleads slightly.
The Ten Wings supplied the Image with its severe instruction about staking one's life on one's will, and later Confucian commentators made this hexagram a favourite text on integrity under hardship. The Analects records Confucius himself in straits between Chen and Cai, which the tradition connects to this figure. James Legge's 1882 English is public domain and keeps the physical brutality of the lines intact. Wilhelm's 1924 German, in Baynes's 1950 English, softens it considerably.
The commonest misreading is the consoling one: that this hexagram means the hard period is nearly over, or that it is happening for a reason. The text says neither. It offers survival with integrity and explicitly refuses to promise anything about duration, and the last line makes movement possible without saying it will be comfortable. Telling somebody in a genuinely bad stretch that it is a lesson adds a second burden to the first.
The second is the credibility clause, which gets dropped because it is unwelcome. The Judgement states that words will not be believed, and that is a real observation about how depletion works socially: people in difficulty are listened to less, which compounds the difficulty. A reading that omits it hands the querent the advice most likely to fail, which is to explain themselves more clearly.
The third is confusing constraint with fault. Because the figure is unfavourable, readers slide into asking what the querent did to arrive here. Nothing in the text supports that. Its subject is a condition, not a punishment, and the fifth line puts the ruler himself in it. A reading that goes looking for the querent's error has supplied a moral the oracle did not.
Put a real question to the coins.