Great Taming, Line 6

Great Taming ends in release. Legge's translation shows its subject in command of the firmament of heaven and promises progress, and after five positions of halting, stripping, training and restraining, the reversal is total. The way that was closed at the opening line stands open at the last, and the whole accumulated force of the lower trigram Qian finally has somewhere to go.

The position is unusual. A strong stroke stands at the very top in an even place, incorrect by the classical rule, at the summit of the restraining mountain Gen, and it is the one line in the hexagram where the mountain stops restraining anything. The tradition reads the image of heaven's open road as the natural consequence of everything below it: the passage is wide because the strength arriving at it has been stored rather than spent along the way.

Closing here is what makes the hexagram coherent. Its Judgment sends its subject into public service and across the great water, and none of that would follow from restraint alone. The four positions of holding exist for the sake of this one of releasing, and the progress promised at the summit is the return on all of them rather than fresh good fortune arriving from outside.

The way is open. Someone drawing this changing line is being told that the long period of holding back described by the rest of the hexagram has come to its end, and that the strength accumulated during it is now to be used rather than conserved any further. The image of commanding the firmament of heaven is one of unobstructed room, and the promise attached to it is simply progress.

What makes the counsel demanding is the habit the preceding positions will have built. A querent who has genuinely spent this hexagram waiting, training, and restraining is unlikely to notice the moment when the restraint stops being required, and the risk at this line is continuing to hold out of practice rather than out of necessity. The reading is an instruction to move, and to move at the scale the accumulation has made possible.

Standing at the very top of the upper trigram Gen in an even place, incorrect by the rule and unrestrained regardless, this line is where the mountain gives way. A reading here belongs to the end of a long preparation rather than to the beginning of anything, and the progress it promises is the one thing the earlier positions were storing everything up to reach. Acting now is not a departure from the discipline those positions imposed; it is the purpose that discipline was serving all along.