Hexagram 63, After Completion

Fire below, Water above. Solid, broken, solid, broken, solid, broken, all the way up. Every yang line sits in an odd place and every yin line sits in an even one, which in the old way of reading is every line exactly where it belongs.

The figure

Fire is the trigram of the middle daughter, clinging, light and clarity, a broken line held between two solid ones. Water is the middle son, the abyss, depth and danger, a solid line held between two broken ones.

Put water over fire and the picture is a pot on the stove. The fire heats the water, the water holds the fire in check, and dinner gets cooked. Everything is doing its job. Nothing is out of place. It is the most orderly figure in the whole book.

And that is the problem with it. A pot on the stove is only in balance while someone is watching. Leave it and the water boils over and puts the fire out, or boils away and the pot burns. The old commentators saw this clearly. Perfect order is the moment just before things start to slide, because there is nowhere to go from perfect except down. The book puts this figure second to last on purpose.

Its pair is Hexagram 64, Before Completion, Fire over Water, the same six lines each flipped to their opposite, and the final figure in the sequence.

When it comes up in a reading

When After Completion comes up for a question, something has been achieved. The project is done, the move is made, the relationship has settled, the thing you were working toward is in your hand. The hexagram acknowledges that, and then it tells you what to do next, which is pay attention.

The sense of the hexagram is that the beginning of a completed thing is good and the end of it is disorder unless you keep tending it. In plain words, you have crossed the river. Now the small things matter. The loose ends, the maintenance, the quiet checking of what you assumed was fixed. The grand effort is over and the careful effort begins.

And a caution, which is the heart of it. Do not try to make this moment last. It will not, and the wanting it to is what hurts. Enjoy the balance, tend it, and know that the lines are already preparing to move.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you are a finisher. Projects complete under your hand. Periods of your life come to proper resolution. You know the particular satisfaction of having done the thing that needed doing, all the way to the end, and you know it more often than most.

You have the integrating gift. Complicated projects with a dozen moving parts come together properly when you are involved, because you can hold all the parts at once and see where each belongs.

You also understand, in your bones, that completion does not last. The peak contains the start of the next slide. I have found that people with this hexagram handle that better than most, because they have stood on enough peaks to know the view is temporary.

The gift is bringing things to a proper close. Plenty of people start. Far fewer finish, and fewer again finish well. You finish well.

The shadow is clinging to the finished state. Wanting the peak to be permanent, resenting the first sign that things are moving on, holding onto the completed thing so tightly that the next thing cannot begin. The mature After Completion sets the finished thing down, tends it, and turns toward the next cycle with the same care that got it here.

The work of a life here is holding each completion lightly enough to let the next thing start.

If a line moves

The I Ching counts lines from the bottom, so line 1 is the lowest. When one of the lower lines is moving, the matter is at its beginning and the counsel is about restraint, the brake applied just as things get going. A moving middle line puts the question at its heart, the small disorders that appear inside an order that looks finished and the patience to deal with them. A moving upper line speaks to the end of the matter, and here it carries the sense of looking back at the river you have crossed and finding your head going under, the completed thing coming apart because you stopped watching the pot. Whichever line moves, change it to its opposite and you have a second hexagram, the direction the situation is heading. The How to Cast a Hexagram page walks through that step by step.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page gives Fire and Water 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, and this is the figure to read it beside, because here yin and yang alternate perfectly and every line is in its proper place. My own association in the tarot is The World, the last card of the Major Arcana with the dancer inside the wreath, and I hold that as my picture and nothing stronger.

What have you finished lately, and who is watching the pot while you plan what comes next?

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