If Bì has appeared in your reading, the book is naming a moment when form matters — the presentation, the arrangement, the surface through which the substance reaches its audience. Fire under mountain: the light is contained, focused, decorative without ceasing to be real warmth.

Classical commentary reads this hexagram as the discipline of adornment. Grace is not the opposite of substance; it is the form by which substance becomes legible. A book without typesetting cannot be read. A meal without arrangement does not feed the eye. The hexagram appears when the reader is doing work that requires not only to be done well but to be seen as such.

What the book counsels is the modesty of the work itself. 小利有攸往 — there is a small advantage in undertaking. Bì does not authorise grand strokes. It authorises the careful, attentive shaping of how the work appears, and warns against mistaking that shaping for the deeper authority of judgment, which belongs to other hexagrams.

Bì's failure mode is the substitution of form for substance. The book is alert to it. Beauty is real, and beauty unattached to any underlying matter is decoration without function. The hexagram appears when the reader is at risk of polishing the surface of something that is no longer worth presenting. Polish what deserves polishing; let what does not be revised, not adorned.