A well in the ground, unchanged while the town around it is rebuilt. Hexagram 48 is about the shared resource that stays constant, and about the fact that it still has to be maintained and reached.
Forty-eighth in the King Wen order. The Sequence places it after Oppression: a person worn out above turns back to what lies below, and what lies below and does not move is the well.
The text: the town may be moved, the well cannot. It neither empties nor fills. People come and go and draw from it. If the rope does not reach the bottom, or the jug is broken, that is misfortune.
Every clause is doing work. The first says the resource outlasts the settlement built on it. The second says its supply is not affected by demand. The third says access is general. The last two say that the well being sound is not sufficient: the equipment for reaching it has to be sound as well, and it is the rope and the jug that fail rather than the water.
Water above wood. In trigram terms the wood is the bucket or the frame, so the image is water being lifted rather than water simply present.
The commentary's instruction is unusually social: the person of standing encourages the people at their work and urges them to help one another. That is a considerable leap from a hole in the ground, and the reasoning behind it is that a well in a Zhou settlement was the shared point of a community's land system. What the Image draws from the figure is not self-sufficiency but mutual provision, which is the opposite of what a modern reader tends to expect from a symbol of inner depth.
Hexagram 48 is the inverse of Hexagram 47, Oppression, and the pair belongs together. Where that figure has water fallen below the basin that should hold it, this one has water reliably present underground and the whole question is whether anybody can get it up.
What it describes is a constant resource. Something in the situation does not change with circumstances: a skill, a body of knowledge, a relationship, an institution, a practice that has been there longer than the current arrangement and will outlast it. The Judgement's claim that the town moves and the well does not is the clearest statement in the book about the difference between infrastructure and what is built on top of it.
The hexagram's real subject is maintenance and access. Four of its six lines describe a well that is muddy, cracked, cleaned but unused, or lined and sound, and only the fifth has water actually being drunk. What the question does matters. Asked what is available, this says something dependable is there. Asked why it is not helping, the answer this hexagram gives is almost always the rope or the jug rather than the water, which points the enquiry at the means of access rather than at the source.
In a relationship question this describes what does not change: the thing two people can reliably draw on, which is often quieter than the parts they would name if asked what the relationship is about.
The useful reading is the maintenance one. A well that nobody clears silts up, and the Judgement is explicit that a sound source with broken equipment produces nothing. In relationship terms that is the couple who genuinely have something and have stopped having the conversations that reach it. The third line, a well cleaned and still not drunk from, is the most painful position in the hexagram and a recognisable one: the work was done and nobody came. The hexagram says nothing about whether they will.
At work this is the shared resource: institutional knowledge, a body of expertise, a system everybody relies on, the person who has been there twelve years and knows how things actually work. The hexagram treats these as more permanent than the organisation around them, which is usually correct.
Its practical content is that shared resources degrade quietly. Nobody is assigned to maintain the well, which is exactly why it silts up, and the failure shows as everything downstream becoming slightly harder rather than as an announced breakage. The Image's instruction about people helping one another is the remedy it offers. The question worth asking is what everybody depends on that nobody currently owns.
The dependable underlying resource rather than the current balance: a skill that can always earn, an asset that produces steadily, a source of income that has been there through several changes of circumstance.
This is not financial advice and it forecasts nothing. What the hexagram supplies is the distinction between the source and the means of reaching it, which has a plain application: a person can hold something genuinely valuable and have no working way to draw on it. That is a solvable problem and a different one from not having the resource. Knowing which of the two you face is the whole of what this figure offers here.
Repair the rope, not the well. The Judgement is specific that the failure in this situation is in the means of access rather than in the source, so find the thing that has broken between you and something you already have. It is usually a habit, a conversation, or a piece of equipment nobody has replaced. Fix that one thing this week and stop investigating the source, which is not what is wrong.
Yin in a yang place, incorrect, at the very bottom. The text says the well is muddy and nobody drinks from it, and adds that no animals come to an old well either.
The bottom of the figure is the bottom of the shaft, where the silt collects. The second clause is bleaker than the first: this is not merely unusable but abandoned, and even the animals have stopped bothering. Changing this line gives Hexagram 5, Waiting, where the resource is present and the time has not come.
Yang in a yin place, incorrect by position but central in the lower trigram. The text has water at the bottom shot at like fish, and a jug that is cracked and leaking.
Something living is in the well, so the source is not dead, and the equipment is broken so nothing can be raised. The shooting detail suggests the resource is being used for sport rather than for what it is. Changing the line gives Hexagram 39, Obstruction, where the difficulty is in the way rather than in the tools.
Yang in a yang place, correct, at the top of the lower trigram. The text is the saddest in the hexagram: the well has been cleaned out and nobody drinks from it. It calls this a grief to the heart and says the king should be enlightened so that all may receive the blessing.
The work was done properly and the benefit is not reaching anybody. Commentators read it as competence that has gone unrecognised. Changing it gives Hexagram 29, The Abysmal, doubled water, danger without any structure around it.
Yin in a yin place, correct, and the first line of the upper trigram. The text says the well is being lined with stone, and that there is no blame.
Lining a well takes it out of use while the work happens, and the text neither praises nor criticises: it is maintenance, which produces nothing on the day and makes everything possible afterwards. It is one of the few places in the book that simply endorses unglamorous repair. Changing it gives Hexagram 28, Preponderance of the Great, a load-bearing structure under strain.
Yang in a yang place, correct, central, in the ruler's seat, and the only line where the well actually works. The text says the well has a clear cold spring and the water is drunk.
Everything the hexagram is about arrives here: sound source, sound access, and somebody actually using it. Note that the good outcome sits in the ruler's position, so the tradition is making a point about whose job it is to keep the commons functioning. Changing this line gives Hexagram 46, Pushing Upward, ascent by accumulation rather than depth held steady.
The top line, yin in a yin place, correct, and at the mouth of the well. The text says the well is drawn from without hindrance and is not covered over, and calls this supremely fortunate.
Being uncovered is the point. A well with the lid left off is available to everybody without permission or negotiation, and this is one of the rare top lines in the book that is entirely favourable rather than describing excess. Changing it gives Hexagram 57, The Gentle, doubled wind, influence that spreads by persistence.
The lower trigram is Xun, wind and also wood, which here reads as the wooden bucket, frame or lining; the upper is Kan, water, which is also the trigram of the pit. Wood under water, drawing water up, is about as literal as the trigram pairings get.
The figure is the exact inversion of Hexagram 47. Turned upside down, exhaustion becomes the well, which is why the two are read as a pair: the same six lines describe a basin drained and a shaft reliably supplied, depending only on which way up you hold them.
The nuclear hexagram is Hexagram 38, Opposition, and it is a pointed thing to find inside a symbol of shared provision. That figure describes two elements pulling apart and people at cross purposes. Underneath a commons sits the fact that people who share a resource frequently disagree about it, and the Image's instruction about urging mutual help reads differently once you notice what the interior says. Its opposite is Hexagram 21, Biting Through, where an obstruction is removed by force rather than by maintenance.
The oracle layer is Western Zhou and the imagery is entirely practical: silt, a cracked jug, a stone lining, a cold spring, an uncovered mouth. These are the observable states of a real village well, recorded as such, and the moral reading was applied afterwards.
The character Jing is a picture of the well itself, a grid of crossed lines, and it is the same graph used for the well-field system, the Zhou land arrangement in which eight families farmed the outer squares of a nine-square grid and worked the central one in common. Whether that system existed as described is disputed by historians, but the association gave this hexagram its strong communal reading in the commentaries, and it is why the Image talks about people helping one another rather than about private resources.
The Ten Wings supplied the Image and the Sequence. Song commentators, Zhu Xi included, used the figure as a model of the constancy of human nature beneath changing circumstances, which is where the modern reading of it as inner depth comes from. James Legge's 1882 English is public domain and keeps the practical vocabulary. Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German, in Cary Baynes's 1950 English, gave the hexagram its familiar shape in English and leans harder on the psychological reading than the Zhou text supports.
The commonest misreading is that this hexagram is about inner resources, full stop. That reading is a Song-dynasty development rather than an ancient one, and it quietly removes the communal content. The Zhou well is a shared village facility and the Image's instruction is about people helping each other. Turning it into a metaphor for personal depth converts a hexagram about the commons into a hexagram about the self, which is a large change to make silently.
The second is skipping the rope and the jug. The Judgement is emphatic that the well being sound is not enough, and four of the six lines describe failures of access rather than failures of supply. Readers consistently take this figure as reassurance that the resource is there, which is the easy half. The harder half is that having something and being able to reach it are different, and most of the misfortune in this hexagram lives in the gap.
The third is the third line, which gets softened. A well cleaned and still not drunk from is described in the text as a grief to the heart, and it is the position of somebody whose good work has gone unused. The oracle records that without offering a remedy, which is more honest than the encouragement usually pasted over it.
Put a real question to the coins.