Progress, Line 6

The topmost line is a punitive expedition kept at home. Legge's translation shows the subject advancing his horns and using them only to punish the rebellious people of his own city, calls the position perilous while granting good fortune and freedom from error, and adds that even under firm correctness there is occasion for regret. The commentary on the image concludes that the course of procedure is not yet brilliant.

Punishing a rebellious town was an ordinary instrument of government in the period the text comes from, and the line is written from inside that practice rather than around it. It is given here as the text gives it. What the line does with the practice is what survives the change of setting, and it is a restriction: the horns go out and are then turned back on the subject's own domain. Force at the summit of Progress is licensed only against what the person is already responsible for.

The stroke is strong at the top of the trigram Li, past the yielding ruling line below it, and the sixth place is the classic's station of excess. Horns are what an animal has when it has run out of other arguments. Everything this hexagram has achieved by brightness, by being seen and being trusted, is at this station being pressed by force instead, and the qualified verdict, good fortune with regret still attached, is the text declining to call that an advance.

Nine at the top gives a querent permission to use force and then immediately fences the permission in. The horns are advanced, they are used only against the rebellious part of the person's own city, and the outcome is dangerous, fortunate and free of error, with regret still attached even under firm correctness. Four qualifications sit on one act, and the accumulation of them is the counsel.

The practice behind the image is the period's own, a ruler disciplining a town inside his own territory, and it is reported as the text reports it. Read for the structure rather than the setting, the line draws a boundary that transfers cleanly to any situation: at the end of a successful advance, force may be applied to what one already governs and to nothing beyond it. The commentary withholds all praise, noting only that the procedure is not yet brilliant, which stops the permission reading as approval.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Li becomes Zhen and the figure becomes Enthusiasm, King Wen 16, thunder coming out of the earth and a movement that other people join willingly. That destination is the alternative this line has not taken. What is being achieved by discipline at the top of Progress could have been achieved by a movement people wanted to be part of, and the regret the text leaves attached is the distance between the two.