rén · yang — tetragrams 55–63 — 22 August to 1 October
Whatever is not put away now will not keep.
The first line is twice-broken. The human region begins here and runs to the end of the book — the last twenty-seven figures belong to man, which is to say to consequence. The province below is unbroken and holds, so this is not yet ruin; it is the season of accounting, when what was made is either stored or lost.
The autumn equinox falls at the hinge between Adornment and Doubt. The yin swells and the yang wanes, and things grow slight. Nothing will transform, nothing will pour out, and every one of the ten thousand things shuts its mouth. The inner door and the gate are both guarded and nothing gets at anything else. Then things draw back, come down, settle, heap together; the yin is about to shut everything and the yang keeps one small opening, and mountain, river, marsh and fen become the place where things are stored. After that, appearances: white on one and black on the other, each going about its office, something worn coming and going. Then the grinding — as if right, as if wrong — and finally the dark of the moon completed, and every shape a thing has can be looked at.
This province answers the question of what you get to keep. Its counsel is nearly always subtraction, and querents mishear subtraction as punishment. It is not. Storage requires that most of a season’s growth be given up; the small opening the yang keeps is small on purpose. If Doubt comes up, do not resolve it by force — the figure is telling you that the thing genuinely is both right and wrong, and that you have been demanding a verdict from a matter that does not contain one. If Looking comes up, the reading is complete: you can now see the whole shape, and you are not being asked to do anything about it except look.