Progress, Line 2

The second line advances and grieves at the same time. Legge's translation gives the appearance of advancing joined to sorrow, attaches good fortune to firm correctness, and then supplies an unexpected turn: the subject will receive great blessing from his grandmother. The commentary on the image credits the outcome to his being in the central place, and in the seat proper to him.

The blessing arrives through the ancestral line, and that is the religious setting the text was composed in, where the dead of a family were petitioned and were held to answer. It is left standing here as the text has it. What the line does with that setting is the part that carries across the centuries, and it is this: help comes from a quarter the subject has not been working on. Every effort in the reading has gone into the advance, and the sorrow is attached to the advance, while the relief comes from behind rather than from ahead.

Structurally this is the strongest yielding position in the lower half of the figure. It is central and correctly placed in the earth trigram Kun. What it does not have is a correspondence above, because the fifth line is yielding as well, and two soft lines do not answer each other. That absence is both why the line is sorrowful and why the support has to arrive from somewhere other than the seat of power.

Six in the second place describes advancement that is going forward and feels like grief. The text grants good fortune to firm correctness and then says the great blessing comes from the grandmother, which is a specific and slightly startling promise inside a line otherwise concerned with sorrow. A querent drawing this is usually doing everything correctly and getting no satisfaction whatever from it.

The source of relief is an ancestress, and the ancestral cult of the period the text belongs to is what makes that intelligible rather than merely consoling. The framing is the period's own and is reported as such. Underneath it the counsel is portable and worth having: what eases this situation is not the thing being worked on. It comes from an older relationship, one that owes the person nothing in any transactional sense and supports them regardless.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Kun becomes Kan and the figure becomes Before Completion, King Wen 64, the final hexagram of the classic, in which every line sits in the wrong place and the crossing is not yet finished. That is a fair account of where sorrowful advance leads if nothing else changes. Progress continued on effort alone stays permanently near the end and never quite at it, and the blessing this line names is precisely the thing that is not effort.