Hexagram 4, Youthful Folly

The sprout from Hexagram 3 has broken through. Now it has to learn what the world is, and it has no idea.

The figure

Water sits below, the middle son, the abyss, depth and danger. Mountain sits above, the youngest son, keeping still. A spring bubbling out at the foot of a mountain, clear and lively and with no notion yet of where it is going to flow.

That is the picture of inexperience. The water is the young mind, moving, eager, a bit all over the place. The mountain is the teacher, still, solid and old, standing over it. The name is often read as a dig at the young, but I read it as a description of a relationship. The folly needs the mountain, and the mountain, left to itself, is just a rock.

Its pair is Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning, the same figure turned upside down.

When it comes up in a reading

When Youthful Folly comes up for a question, the moment is telling you that you are the learner here, whatever your age and whatever you think you know. The situation is new to you and the counsel is to find someone who knows it and listen to them.

The sense of the hexagram carries a sharp edge for the learner. The teacher answers a sincere question once. Ask the same thing three times, hoping for a different answer, and the teacher goes quiet, and rightly so. If you have cast this hexagram about a question you have already asked the oracle twice this week, that is your answer. Stop asking and go and do something with what you were told.

There is a message for the teacher in it too. If you are the mountain in this story, your job is to be steady and to answer plainly. Do not chase the student, do not flatter them and do not punish them for being young. Clear water finds its own way down once it has a bank to run against.

I find this one comes up most for people who are embarrassed to be beginners. It is a kind message underneath. Everyone who knows anything was once the spring at the foot of the mountain, and most of them were a lot sillier about it than you are being.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you are a learner by constitution. You take in information, experience and teaching with real hunger, and even when you are expert in one thing you are happily a beginner in three others. The beginner's mind is part of what you bring.

You welcome teachers. Where some people have to have it all worked out before they will listen, you go looking for the person who knows, and that openness is rarer than it should be. Something in you stays unjaded as you age. You still meet the world as a student, with your notebook open.

So your knowledge is earned the slow way. You try things and make the mistakes that trying brings, and the wisdom you end up with is yours because you paid for it. Finding good mentors and apprenticing yourself to them, formally or over a cup of tea, is one of the patterns of your life. And in time you become the teacher. Hexagram 4 people very often end up guiding the next lot of learners later in life, and they are good at it because they remember what the fog felt like.

The shadow is staying naive past the point where it serves you. Some situations need an open door and some need a locked one, and knowing which is which is ongoing work. The second shadow follows from the first. The openness that finds you good teachers can also find you the other kind, the ones who are collecting followers. If a teacher needs you to stay small, leave.

At maturity you become what I would call the wise fool, in the best sense. Decades of real learning with the openness of the first day still intact. The elder who can meet a young person exactly where they are, because they never forgot being there.

If a line moves

Lines are counted from the bottom. A moving lower line puts the matter at its beginning, the first lesson and the first correction, and asks how firmly the fault should be named. A moving middle line is the heart of the matter, where the learner either takes the teaching in or starts playing the fool on purpose. A moving upper line is the end, where the going too far is punishment, and the counsel is to stop a wrong without becoming cruel about it. Change the moving line to its opposite and you have the second hexagram, the direction the situation is heading. The How to Cast a Hexagram page shows how.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page gives Water and Mountain on their own, with their lines, their places in the family and the pictures they carry. The Chinese Astrology section has a page on Yin and Yang for the two kinds of line. My own association in the tarot is The Fool, the one stepping off the edge with a small bag and a lot of trust, and I hold that as my picture and nothing stronger.

Who taught you the thing you are best at, and have you ever gone back and said so?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.