Great Power, Line 2

The second line says almost nothing, and the silence is its content. Legge's translation gives only that with firm correctness there will be good fortune, and the commentary on the image supplies the whole explanation in one clause about the subject being in the centre. No toes, no ram, no fence. In a hexagram crowded with animals and barriers this is the one place where the text declines to picture anything at all.

The reason lies in the structure. This stroke is strong and central in the lower trigram Qian, the seat from which the lower half of the figure is governed, and it stands in proper correspondence with the yielding fifth line above. Centrality is the classic's standing name for strength that needs no image because it is not doing anything visible with itself. The lines around it are all cases of force meeting something: toes advancing, horns catching, a fence opening. This one is force at rest in the right place.

Read across the whole hexagram, the line functions as the standard the others fall short of. Great Power is a figure about excess, and its judgement offers only that firm correctness will be advantageous, withholding the usual promises of progress and success. The second line is what that judgement looks like when a single line satisfies it completely, which is why it needs no picture and receives no qualification.

Nine in the second place is the most reliable reading in Great Power and also the least dramatic. Firm correctness brings good fortune, and that is the whole of what the text offers. A querent landing here has strength available and the sense to keep it where it belongs, and the commentary's appeal to the centre is the practical instruction: act from the middle of your own position rather than from its edges.

Structure carries all of it. This is the strong central stroke of the lower trigram Qian, answered by the yielding fifth line in the trigram of thunder above. By the ordinary rule a firm line in an even seat is incorrectly placed, so what this line holds is centrality rather than perfect propriety, and in a figure about force the classic treats the first as worth more than the second. Being in the middle is what keeps power from turning into display.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Qian becomes Li and the figure becomes Abundance, King Wen 55, greatness at its fullest with the warning that the sun at noon begins to decline. That is the natural consequence of well governed strength and the caution that travels with it. Power kept central accumulates, and what accumulates eventually reaches a height from which the only remaining movement is downward, which is a difficulty this line does not yet have.