Applying for Private School

A friend of mine had a daughter who was about to graduate from middle school and wanted to apply to a private high school. This friend did a divination and received the sixth line of the Meng hexagram, changing from Meng into Shi. She said to me, “Jing Tian, does this mean my younger daughter won’t succeed in applying to private school this time?” I said, “Why would you think that?” She said, “Look, it changes into the Shi hexagram, and in your book you say that Shi is a hexagram of defeat in war.”

I said, “Yes, but we also need to look at where Shi comes from. The same Shi hexagram takes on different meanings when it emerges from Kun and when it emerges from Meng. For example, suppose someone loses ten dollars. If it were Bill Gates, he probably would not spend too much time looking for it. But if it were a child whose monthly allowance is only ten dollars in total, that child would certainly be extremely anxious, right? So what we need to consider is the change in the hexagram image: its starting point and its ending point, rather than one isolated hexagram image. Otherwise, confusion can easily arise.

The opening and line statements of a hexagram serve precisely this function of clarifying such confusion. Here, the sixth-line statement says that the mother and child resist an outside enemy together, and that it is favorable to resist robbers. This shows that the action succeeds and that the bonding relationship is preserved. Therefore, the result of this school application should be quite good, for three reasons:

First, the theme of this hexagram is breaking through the shell. Your daughter’s effort in middle school is like a chick constantly pecking at the shell; now she finally breaks through and becomes a young bird.

Second, in the original hexagram, the upper trigram changes from Gen into Kun. Gen represents obstruction, Kan represents the child, and Kun represents disappearance. This symbolizes that the obstacles and resistance your child has been facing have disappeared.

Third, when a child applies to a school, what we hope for is that the child and the school match and come together, that is, we seek a bonding relationship with the school. The changing line in the Hidden Hexagram gives Li below and Qian above. Li represents a bonding relationship, and Qian represents success. This is precisely the image of a successful bonding relationship. So your daughter’s application should be fine; you can relax.”