Remorse

Remorse (Chinese hui) is one of the two lesser verdicts that fall between good and ill fortune. It names the sorrow that follows a fault — but a sorrow that turns a person back toward the right, so that the oracle's fuller phrase is almost always "remorse disappears." In the Great Treatise's scheme, remorse and Humiliation are the images of "sorrow and forethought": the small signs by which loss is registered before it becomes complete.

Its dynamic is visible in hexagram 16, where hesitation and misplaced looking-upward both "create remorse." Remorse is therefore the favorable member of the pair: it points backward to a mistake but forward to its correction. Where remorse is felt and acted on, the fault is mended and the remorse vanishes; where the warning is ignored, the situation slides toward Misfortune. To feel remorse rightly is already to be turning toward No Blame.