Water standing above a lake, which holds only so much. Jie is limitation, and the hexagram's one qualification is that a limit which has turned bitter should not be kept.
Sixtieth in the King Wen order. The Sequence places it after Dispersion: things cannot go on scattering for ever, so something has to set a bound to them, and Jie is the name for that bound.
The Judgement is short: Jie. Things go through. Bitter limitation must not be persisted in.
The second sentence is unusual for this book, which rarely qualifies its own recommendation so directly. Limits are approved, and then a specific kind of limit is ruled out: one that has become galling. The Chinese word is the one used for bitter tastes. What is being described is not severity, which the text tolerates, but a restriction that has passed the point where anyone can sustain it. The hexagram is therefore about calibration rather than discipline, and the sixth line returns to the same warning at the end.
The Image: water above the lake. The noble person works out number and measure, and weighs the nature of conduct.
A lake is a limit that exists physically. It holds a definite volume and the water above it will fill that and no more. What follows for conduct is the most technical instruction in the book: devise measures, establish quantities. This is the Image that produced the Chinese association of this hexagram with regulation, calendars and the joints of bamboo, which the name also denotes. The recommendation is to make limits explicit and numerical rather than to rely on judgement in the moment.
The character for this hexagram is the word for the joint of a bamboo stalk, and everything else follows from that. A bamboo joint is a natural division: it interrupts the stem, it is what gives the stem its strength, and it is where growth is regulated. From there the word extends to nodes, measures, moderation, and the divisions of the calendar.
So limitation here is structural rather than punitive. A limit is what makes something able to bear weight, in the same way that the joints are what stop a hollow stem from collapsing. The lake below and the water above give the same argument in a different image: a container defines how much there can be, and without the container there is no lake, only a flood.
The hexagram then does something most treatments underplay. Having recommended limits, the Judgement immediately excludes bitter limitation, and the sixth line repeats the exclusion. The text is aware that restriction is easy to overdo and says so twice. What changes with the question: asked whether to set a boundary, the hexagram is in favour. Asked about a restriction already in place, it wants to know whether anyone can actually live inside it.
In a relationship question Jie is about the agreed shape of things: what is expected, what is off limits, how much of each other's time and attention is assumed. The hexagram treats explicit limits as what makes a relationship able to carry weight rather than as a restriction on it.
The first two lines are a matched pair worth reading together. Not going out of the door is without blame; not going out of the gate is misfortune. The difference is degree, and the text does not explain it. Some withdrawal is proper and more of the same is not, and the hexagram declines to say where the line falls. Nothing here reports on what the other person wants.
At work this is scope, budget, hours, the defined edge of a role. The Image's instruction to devise number and measure is close to a description of ordinary management, and the hexagram is straightforwardly in favour of it.
The fifth line is the good one: sweet limitation brings good fortune, and going forward earns esteem. Sweet is set against the bitter limitation the Judgement rules out, and the difference is whether the person under the limit can live with it. A constraint everyone quietly works around is a bitter one. The hexagram will not tell you whether yours is sweet or bitter, but the people subject to it can.
In a money question Jie is the budget, the ceiling, the rule set in advance. The hexagram approves of fixed measures and the Image is explicit about numbers, which makes it one of the few figures that fits a financial question naturally.
What it adds is the warning against bitter limitation, and it is worth taking literally. A restriction so severe that it gets abandoned is worse than a moderate one that holds, because the abandonment usually takes the whole arrangement with it. That is a general observation about rules and not advice about your money, which needs your actual records and someone qualified to read them.
Write the limit down as a number and a date. Not a principle, not an intention: a figure someone else could check. The Image's instruction is to devise number and measure, and limits that stay qualitative get renegotiated quietly until they are gone. Then check whether the number you wrote is one you could keep for a year without resenting it.
Yang in a yang place, correctly placed, at the very bottom. Not going out of the door and the courtyard; no blame. The line describes staying in, at the earliest point, and the verdict is the absence of fault rather than good fortune. A strong line at the base knows the situation has not opened yet and does not force it. Nothing is being avoided; the door simply has nowhere to lead yet. Changing it produces Hexagram 29, The Abysmal.
Yang in a yin place, not correctly placed, though central. Not going out of the gate and the courtyard; misfortune. This is nearly the same sentence as the line below it with the opposite verdict, and the difference is timing. The moment to move has arrived and the line is still applying the previous restraint. Limitation held past its occasion is the fault named. Changing it produces Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning.
Yin in a yang place, incorrectly placed. One who observes no limitation will have cause to lament; there is no blame. The verdict is strange and it is deliberate: the lamenting is the consequence, and the text withholds fault because the person has already met the result of their own conduct. Regret arriving on its own is treated as sufficient. The line is the hexagram's only description of what happens with no limit at all. Changing it produces Hexagram 5, Waiting.
Yin in a yin place, correctly placed, and the text is two words with a verdict: contented limitation, success. This is the limit that has been accepted rather than imposed, and it is the only line in the hexagram where the restriction produces no friction at all. Correct placement is doing the work here, and contentment is a property of the arrangement rather than of anyone's mood. Changing it produces Hexagram 58, The Joyous.
Yang in a yang place, central and correct, the ruling line. Sweet limitation brings good fortune; going forward earns esteem. Sweet is the deliberate opposite of the bitter limitation the Judgement forbids, and the pairing of tastes is the text's own way of grading restrictions. A limit that can be lived with is the one that produces movement, which is why this line permits going somewhere. Changing it produces Hexagram 19, Approach.
Yin in a yin place at the top, correctly placed, and the verdict is split. Bitter limitation; persistence brings misfortune; remorse disappears. Both halves are meant. Holding to a restriction this severe goes badly, and the regret still lifts, which most commentators read as the relief that follows abandoning it. This is the Judgement's warning restated at the point where a quality has gone too far. Changing it produces Hexagram 61, Inner Truth.
The lower trigram is Dui, Lake; the upper is Kan, Water. Water standing above a lake, and a lake is a container with a definite capacity. The figure is not water being blocked but water meeting the edge of what will hold it, which is a different and more exact image of a limit.
The nuclear hexagram, from lines two to five, is Hexagram 27, The Corners of the Mouth, the same nuclear figure as both its neighbours in the sequence. Inside limitation sits the question of nourishment: what is being taken in, and how much of it. That is close enough to the surface reading to reinforce it rather than complicate it, which is unusual.
The inverse is Hexagram 59, Dispersion, the figure immediately before. Turn Jie over and you get scattering; the two are a King Wen pair and the sequence sets them directly against each other. The opposite, every line reversed, is Hexagram 56, The Wanderer, a figure with no fixed place at all, which is what the absence of limits produces.
The Zhou oracle layer, roughly ninth century BCE, gives the two door-and-courtyard lines and the taste words, sweet and bitter. The tastes are doing real classificatory work rather than decorating: the text grades restrictions the way one would grade food.
The name is the ordinary word for a bamboo joint, and by extension a node, a measure, a festival and a division of the calendar. Chinese still uses it in all those senses. That semantic range is not a later gloss; it is present in the word the Zhou compilers chose.
The Ten Wings, from about the fourth to second centuries BCE, supply the Image with its instruction to devise number and measure, which is the earliest place the book recommends anything like quantification. The Song commentators developed the hexagram into an account of moderation as a virtue.
In English, James Legge's 1882 translation is public domain and renders the name as Regulations. Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German, through Cary Baynes in 1950, gives Limitation, which is the title most readers know. Legge's choice is closer to the bamboo joint and the calendar; Wilhelm's is closer to what a modern reader wants the hexagram to be about.
Jie is read as a recommendation of self-denial, and the Judgement contains an explicit instruction against exactly that. Bitter limitation must not be persisted in. The hexagram is not on the side of severity; it is on the side of measures that hold, and it says twice that a restriction nobody can sustain is a failure rather than a discipline.
The second misreading comes from the pair of lines at the bottom. Staying in is blameless at the first line and unfortunate at the second, and treatments generally resolve this by inventing a reason: the first person had no opportunity, the second refused one. The text supplies neither explanation. The only stated difference is position, and reading the lines honestly means accepting that the same conduct is graded by timing alone.
The third is the loss of the bamboo. The name is a physical word for a joint in a stem, and the whole hexagram follows from what a joint does: it interrupts growth and it is what makes the stem strong. Translating it as Limitation and stopping there turns a structural observation into a moral one, and the moral version is the one that produces the self-denial reading in the first place.
Put a real question to the coins.