If Lí has appeared in your reading, the book is naming the configuration of doubled brightness — fire above, fire below. The character itself carries the sense both of light and of clinging-to, and the hexagram trades on both meanings. To shine, a flame must hold to its wick. Pure brightness without an attachment is a paradox the book refuses.

Classical commentary reads this hexagram as the discipline of what one's attention rests on. The fire is not chosen freely; it is dependent on the substance it consumes. The reader is being asked to notice what is currently feeding their light — what their attention has chosen to dwell on, what they have agreed, often unconsciously, to burn through.

What the book counsels is captured in the strange last clause of the judgment: 畜牝牛吉 — tending the cow is auspicious. The cow is the gentlest of working animals; here it stands for the patient husbandry of one's attention. The brightness is not the achievement; the steady tending of what makes the brightness possible is the achievement.

Lí's failure mode is the brilliant burn that consumes its own conditions. The book is alert to it. The hexagram appears when the reader's attention is at risk of either dispersing into many small fires or narrowing into one that exhausts its source. The work is to know what your light is clinging to, and to make sure that thing is worth what it is being asked to give.