Following
Judgment
— I Ching · classical
元亨利贞，无咎。
To follow well brings deep success — hold to what is right, and there is nothing to fault.
Image
— Great Image
泽中有雷，随，君子以向晦入宴息。
Thunder resting within the lake: this is the image of Following. Seeing this, a person of integrity withdraws at dusk to rest and renew themselves.
Six Lines
— Bottom to top
Modern Readings
— Interdisciplinary
Career & Management
Ride a market shift (digital transformation, globalization wave). Build products that match user habits; do not try to educate the user against the trend.
Psychology & Cognition
Surrender unnecessary stubbornness. In a changing world, adaptive following is the truest form of agency.
Decision Guidance
Choose what to follow with care. Cleave to the strong, drop the trivial; following badly is worse than not following.
Integrated Reading
— Structure · timing · relations
Following places The Joyous / Lake above The Arousing / Thunder. Read the lower trigram as the emerging ground and the upper trigram as the field, pressure, or constraint it must answer. The core theme is Following · Adaptive yielding · Choosing whom to follow. Relations: the opposite hexagram shows the shadow/complement (Work on What Has Been Spoiled); the inverse shows the other-side view (Work on What Has Been Spoiled); the nuclear hexagram shows the hidden internal mechanism (Development).
Line Path
Line path: Initial Nine → Six in the second → Six in the third → Nine in the fourth → Nine in the fifth → Six at the top. Read from bottom to top to see how the situation emerges, develops, crosses thresholds, and resolves.
Reflection Prompt
Am I acting from the proper position of Following, or am I being pulled by following trends without judgment? What is the smallest reversible next move that respects the timing?
Western Parallels
— Cross-cultural
Heraclitus' 'no man steps in the same river twice'; Agile/Lean philosophy of customer-led iteration; Confucian 'choose the worthy and follow them' (zé qí shàn zhě ér cóng zhī); the management-literature paraphrase of Darwin on responsiveness to change (popularized by Leon Megginson, often mistakenly quoted as Darwin's own words) as a caution about sourcing quotes carefully.
· English renderings and modern readings are original editorial writing, cross-checked against public-domain and classical commentary lineages.
· Hexagram Cast does not predict, score, schedule, ward, or recommend rituals.
· Modern inputs are reproducible; traditional casts can be audited line by line from the stored coin/yarrow trace.