Great Power, Line 5

The fifth line gives up the animal. Legge's translation shows the subject losing his ram-like strength in the ease of his position and states that there will be no occasion for repentance, while the commentary on the image observes that the place is not the appropriate one for him. Something is genuinely lost here, and the text declines to treat the loss as a misfortune, which is the whole of what makes this line interesting.

The position accounts for both halves of that. A yielding stroke occupies the ruling seat of the upper trigram Zhen, holding the centre of a hexagram whose entire character is force, and by the ordinary rule a soft line in an odd place is incorrectly placed. The commentary says exactly that. Yet the ease the text names is real: a yielding line at the ruling seat is not required to butt at anything, and the four strong lines beneath it do not have to be driven.

Read against the third and sixth lines, both of which put a ram into a fence, this one is the figure's alternative. The ram is what gets caught. A person who mislays their capacity for display, at a station where display is not needed, has lost the thing that would have entangled them, and the text records no regret because nothing in the situation requires what went missing.

Six in the fifth place describes somebody whose forcefulness has quietly drained away, and tells them it does not matter. The ram is lost in the ease of the position, and no repentance follows. A querent drawing this often reads it as a warning that they have gone soft, and the text is saying something more precise than that: the strength which has gone was the visible, butting kind, and the situation no longer calls for that kind.

The structure is unusual and the commentary flags it. A yielding stroke sits at the ruling seat of the trigram of thunder, incorrectly placed by the ordinary rule, governing four firm lines it never had to subdue. Ease is the operative word in the line. Where a position carries authority of its own, force added to it is redundant, and the text quietly removes the redundancy without asking whether the person minded losing it.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Zhen becomes Dui and the figure becomes Breakthrough, King Wen 43, in which a single yielding line at the top is resolutely removed by the five strong lines beneath. That is a caution folded into a favourable reading. Ease which goes on long enough stops being ease and becomes the one soft thing everybody below is pushing against, and the difference is whether the position is still doing work the lost strength was never needed for.