Shi He is the hexagram of cutting through an obstruction. The figure pictures a mouth with something hard between the teeth — an object that must be bitten through before the jaws can close — and the old readers saw any obstacle that blocks a union and can only be removed by a firm, decisive act. The judgment says it furthers one to administer justice. The image is of the firm line in the center biting through what stands in its way, and the teaching is that some obstacles yield to nothing but a clean, resolute bite.
Read against the working life, the figure is about the problem that will not dissolve on its own. The lines trace the bite through tender meat, through dried meat, through gristly meat — the commentators' scale of difficulty, each stage asking more resolve and more patience. The fourth line, receiving metal arrows, and the fifth, receiving yellow gold, mark the reward of the one who bites through hard things: difficulty met and mastered becomes a prize. But the bite must be aimed, not blind — force without justice merely bruises.
For a household or a partnership, Shi He was read as the difficult conversation, the grievance that festers until someone has the courage to name it. The obstruction between people, the ancients taught, is removed the same way as the object between the teeth — not by waiting for it to soften, but by one honest, decisive act of speech. The first line, feet in the stocks so the toes disappear, is their picture of the small restraint that warns before the greater one is needed.
Within a cycle, this figure marks a phase when progress is blocked by something specific and removable. The image of fire and thunder is the book's picture of a force that strikes and illuminates at once — judgment that is both firm and clear-sighted. The counsel is to find the exact point of obstruction and bite through it, neither flinching from the act nor striking at random, since the bite that clears the way is the one that lands where the obstacle truly is.
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Cast the I Ching Oracle → Free · No sign-up · 3,000-year-old methodSource: Judgment and line texts follow the Wilhelm/Baynes rendering of the Yijing.