Virtue Not Continuously Maintained, and the People Who Will Not Have Him

The third line breaks the hexagram's single requirement. Legge's translation shows one who does not continuously maintain his virtue, adds that there are those who will impute this to him as a disgrace, and concludes that however firm he may be there will be ground for regret. The commentary on the image is shorter and harder: he does not continuously maintain his virtue, and no one will accept him.

Where the cost falls is the striking part. The line does not describe a wrong action, a loss, or any external misfortune. It describes a character that will not hold its shape, and the consequence is entirely social. Other people impute the disgrace and other people decline to have him. In a figure whose whole subject is what endures, the thing that fails is the one thing the hexagram asks a person to supply out of themselves.

The stroke is strong in an odd place, correct by the ordinary rule, at the top of the lower trigram Xun. Correctness of position again proves no defence, because the fault lies not in the seat but in the movement through time that no seat can describe. A line at the top of its trigram stands at a hinge, and this hexagram measures a person precisely by whether they are the same at the hinge as they were below it.