Hexagram 18 · Work on the Decayed (蠱 Gǔ)
Mountain ☶ over Wind ☴
Wind stilled at the mountain's foot · what was let go has spoiled
Work on the Decayed is the hexagram of repair, of facing a mess that neglect has allowed to grow and setting it right. The Chinese name pictures a bowl of food left so long that worms breed in it, which sounds grim until you read the rest of the figure, because the whole point is that decay is a call to renewal, not a verdict of doom. Something has been let slide. The task in front of you is to fix it.
Mountain sits above, still and obstructing; Wind sits below, stopped at the mountain's base where its movement stagnates. The combination is stagnation, the conditions under which things spoil. But the commentary frames the work optimistically: putting right what was let go brings real advance, and the old text gives a striking structure of reflecting for three days before you begin and three days after, so that the repair is thorough and the cause understood. This is renewal through honest, deliberate effort.
What this hexagram counsels in a reading
When Gu answers your question, it is pointing at something that has been allowed to deteriorate, perhaps for a while, and asking you to face it honestly and do the repair work fully. The counsel is not to paper over the problem or to act in haste, but to understand how it got this way and to mend it properly. The hexagram treats trouble as an opportunity: the very fact that something has decayed is your chance to restore it, and the restoration can be a genuine step forward.
Why Work on the Decayed sits directly after Following
Gu never gets a sentence of its own in the Sequence of the Hexagrams. It has to share one with the hexagram before it, arriving as the consequence clause rather than a new subject, and the word the handover turns on has nothing rotten in it at all.
以喜隨人者，必有事，故受之以蠱；蠱者事也。
One who gladly follows others is bound to end up with things to deal with, so it is received by Gu; Gu means affairs.
Sequence of the Hexagrams. Source: Chinese Wikisource.
事 is affairs, business, what is on your plate — an administrator’s word. Now look at the name it is being asked to explain. 蠱 is 蟲, insects, sitting on top of 皿, a vessel — the graph is a bowl with things breeding in it. The wing had every word for spoilage available and reached instead for paperwork. The Zagua is no warmer: 蠱則飭也, Gu is putting things in order. Nothing rots in either commentary. Somebody simply has work on his hands, and the reason he has it is that he spent Sui going along with people.
The judgment then hands that chore an unexpectedly large promise, and a schedule:
蠱：元亨。利涉大川。先甲三日，後甲三日。
Gu: supreme success. It furthers one to cross the great water. Three days before jia, three days after jia.
利涉大川 is the book’s phrase for a crossing worth the risk, and it is being offered to someone whose whole situation is defined by neglect. Then comes the part judgments almost never do: a date. 甲 is the first of the ten heavenly stems, the opening day of the old ten-day week, and the text fences off three days on either side of it. The same construction surfaces once more in the received text, at the fifth line of Xun, where the stem is 庚 instead. Whatever it originally prescribed, it is an instruction about when, not about what — timing is the one thing Gu is precise about.
The lines make the mess personal. 父, father, stands in four of the six line statements; 母, mother, in one; the sixth names no parent at all.
初六：幹父之蠱，有子考，无咎，厲終吉。
九二：幹母之蠱，不可貞。
Six at the beginning: setting right what the father spoiled. There is a son to the departed father. No blame. Danger, and in the end good fortune.
Nine in the second place: setting right what the mother spoiled. One cannot be steadfast.
The mother’s line is where the book withdraws its own standing advice. 貞, holding firm, is what this text recommends nearly everywhere it speaks; here it is ruled out in three characters, with no reason given and nothing offered in its place.
And the top line repairs nothing:
上九：不事王侯，高尚其事。
Nine at the top: he does not serve kings and lords; he holds his own affairs higher.
Eight characters, and 事 is in there twice — first as a verb, to serve, then as the noun the Xugua used to define the entire hexagram. The way out of Gu is not a completed restoration. It is a man who stops taking on other people’s business. The text never says the decay got cleared.
Judgment and line texts follow the copy at Chinese Wikisource, which prints 幹 where some editions print 干, and 无 for 無. That copy punctuates the first line 有子考，无咎; a common alternative reads 有子，考无咎, which shifts the absolution from the son onto the dead father. The rendering above follows the punctuation as printed. The Sequence and Zagua clauses are at Xugua and Zagua on the same site; the Xun page there prints 后庚三日 where this page prints 後甲三日, the same word in a different graph. The English is a plain rendering, close to the Chinese rather than literary. What 先甲三日 actually prescribed is disputed, and the text itself does not explain it.
In love and relationships
For relationships, Work on the Decayed often points to something that has been neglected, an unspoken resentment, a problem long avoided, a pattern allowed to rot. The counsel is to address it honestly rather than letting it fester further. This is repair work, and repair work in a relationship can be deeply renewing when it is done with care and a real understanding of how things got here. The danger is only in continuing to look away.
In work and money
In work, Gu describes a situation that has been mismanaged or left to slide and now needs serious cleaning up. Take it on fully; understand the root cause; do the repair thoroughly rather than patching it. With money, it points to neglected affairs that need attention, debts, accounts, or arrangements that have decayed through avoidance, and it rewards the disciplined effort to set them in order properly.
Moving lines and the changing hexagram
The moving lines of Work on the Decayed describe repairing what different people, often parents in the old text, have spoiled, with care taken not to be too harsh or too lax. A changing line here usually comments on how you are handling the repair and whose neglect you are correcting. Read it as guidance on doing the mending thoroughly and fairly. The hexagram it becomes shows what the restored situation turns into once the work is done.
Its Tarot kin
On the deck side of this site, Work on the Decayed rhymes with Death. Both are about endings that clear the way for renewal, the necessary breakdown of what has run its course. Death is transformation, the old form released so the new can come; Gu is that same cycle, the decay that, faced honestly, becomes the ground for something restored.
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