Union Sought Without a Beginning, at the Close of the Figure

The last line of Holding Together is the hexagram's only outright misfortune, and the reason given for it is a matter of timing rather than of character. Legge's translation shows the subject seeking union and attachment without having taken the first step toward such an end, and the small commentary closes the case flatly: there is no possibility of a good issue. Nothing is said about the sincerity of the wish. The line simply arrives after the moment in which the wish could have been acted on.

The Judgment of the hexagram anticipates this ending. It warns that those who come too late will fare badly, and the topmost line is where that warning is realized. Yielding at the top of the upper trigram Kan, past the ruling fifth place and outside its reach, the line has watched the whole process of attachment complete itself without joining in, and now finds the center already surrounded.

Read against the first line, the pairing is exact and deliberate. The opening six offered nothing but a full vessel of good faith and was promised further good fortune for it; the closing six offers a request at the end and is promised nothing. Between them the hexagram makes its plainest structural argument. Holding Together is not a state one can enter at any convenient point, because the bond it describes is built out of the whole sequence of steps that led to it, and a beginning never taken cannot be supplied afterward.