Sui is the hexagram of going with what is right. Thunder, the stirring force, moves beneath the lake, and the old readers saw strong motion finding its rest in a calm and joyful surface — the picture of following, of adapting one's movement to a course that is already sound. The judgment promises supreme success with no blame. The teaching is that following is not weakness; it is the intelligent recognition of a direction worth joining, and the whole figure turns on the difference between following well and following blindly.
Turned toward the working life, the figure is about the discipline of taking direction. The lines set the choice in the sharpest terms: cling to the little boy and you lose the strong man; cling to the strong man and you lose the little boy. The commentators read this as the central law of the figure — one cannot follow everything at once. To follow a master, a cause, or a course of work is to let go of the lesser attachments that would pull one aside.
For the bonds between people, Sui was read as the willingness to yield that makes a relationship work. The fifth line, sincere in the good, was the ancients' short praise of the person who follows not any whim but what is genuinely good — in a partner, in a friend, in oneself. And the closing line, meeting with firm allegiance, pictures the following that deepens into loyalty, the free choice that becomes a bond neither party would break.
Within a cycle, this figure marks a phase when the wise course is to align with a larger movement rather than strike out alone. The image of thunder beneath the lake is the book's picture of energy that finds its channel and flows gladly into it. The counsel is to follow what is worthy — to choose the direction with care, and then to give it one's full motion, since a following freely chosen is not servitude but strength wisely aimed.
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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.