Innocence, Line 6

The closing line of Wu Wang describes a subject still free from insincerity who will nonetheless fall into error by acting, with no advantage in any direction. Legge's translation does not withdraw the innocence; it withdraws the occasion for it. The sincerity is intact and the moment for expressing it has gone, and the hexagram ends by insisting that those are separate questions.

Position carries the whole meaning. A strong line stands at the very top in an even place, incorrect by the rule, beyond the ruling fifth position and past the point where the upper trigram Qian has anywhere further to rise. Movement from here is movement for its own sake, and the tradition reads the error not as a defect of character but as a defect of timing, which is why the text can call the subject blameless and the action mistaken in the same breath.

Ending here gives the figure a boundary it would otherwise lack. Wu Wang promises supreme success to natural, unpremeditated rightness, and its final line marks where that promise stops. Innocence carried past its own moment turns into recklessness, and the last word of the hexagram is that even a clean impulse has to answer the question of whether now is when it belongs.

Do not act on it. Someone drawing this changing line is being told that the impulse they hold is sincere, that they are not mistaken about their own motives, and that carrying it into action now would still be an error with no advantage anywhere in it. That combination is what makes the line hard to accept, since it withholds the usual consolation that a good motive redeems a badly timed act.

The distinction the reading turns on is between being right and being timely. The hexagram has spent five positions establishing that natural, uncalculated conduct succeeds, and its final line supplies the condition attached to all of it. What was fitting earlier in the sequence is no longer fitting at the end, and a querent's certainty about their own sincerity is not evidence either way about the timing.

Standing at the very top of the upper trigram Qian, past the ruling position and with nowhere further to rise, this line describes a moment already complete. A reading here generally counsels stopping rather than redirecting: not a better version of the action, not a different target for it, but the recognition that the situation has moved beyond the point where any action of this kind belongs in it.