I Ching · Hexagram 63 After Completion
Hexagram 63 line 3: After Completion, yang in the third place

I Ching 63.3
The Illustrious Ancestor disciplines the Devil's Country. After three years he conquers it. Inferior people must not be employed.
A long, exhausting campaign to finish what completion left unfinished, and the warning that the people who helped win it must not be given the power afterwards. Success is expensive, and its distribution is a second test.
Advice. The last campaign takes years; win it, and do not hand its rewards to the unworthy.
What changes when line 3 moves
Line 3 of Hexagram 63 is yang, a solid line. When it is cast as old yang (a 9) it flips, and the hexagram becomes Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning: A birth is hard: the situation is new, tangled and full of promise, and it needs helpers.
Read together, the reading moves from After Completion toward Difficulty at the Beginning. Every line in its proper place: the crossing made, order achieved, and the only remaining task to keep it from decaying. Thunder below, water above: a storm at the start of things, and a blade of grass pushing through packed earth. Difficulty at the Beginning describes the chaos of a genuine start, not a failure. The primary hexagram describes the situation; the changing line is the point of movement in it; the resulting hexagram is where that movement leads. Both hexagrams belong to the reading, and the changing line is the hinge between them.
Line 3 in context
- Love & relationships
- The last campaign takes years; win it, and do not hand its rewards to the unworthy. In love and relationships, Hexagram 63 reads: Things are in order and the reading says this is the moment of greatest risk, not because anything is wrong but because nothing is. Keep attending to the small things. The relationship that assumes it is finished is the one that starts to decay.
- Career
- The last campaign takes years; win it, and do not hand its rewards to the unworthy. In career, Hexagram 63 reads: The project is done, the position reached, the structure in place. Now maintain it. Small matters only; no large new ventures on the strength of the completion. Watch for the first signs of slippage and arm against them.
- Money
- The last campaign takes years; win it, and do not hand its rewards to the unworthy. In money, Hexagram 63 reads: Goals met, affairs in order. The reading warns against the complacency that follows success. Keep the discipline that got you here; the disorder at the end comes from relaxing it.
- A decision
- The last campaign takes years; win it, and do not hand its rewards to the unworthy. In decisions, Hexagram 63 reads: Decide for maintenance and small adjustments, not for the next great thing. The reading is favourable in small matters and warns that the end of completion is disorder unless it is guarded.
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