Retreat, Line 4

The fourth line is where retreat becomes a decision rather than a necessity. Legge's translation has the subject retiring notwithstanding his likings, and states that this brings good fortune in a superior man while a small man cannot attain to it. Nothing external has changed between this line and the one below. The situation still holds whatever the person wants, and the person goes anyway, which is the entire content of the line.

Superior man and small man are the classic's own pair, a distinction of character drawn in the social vocabulary of the period, and the line is given in those terms here because that is how the text gives it. The operative claim underneath the vocabulary is about capacity rather than rank. Somebody who can act against their own preference has a resource that somebody governed by preference does not, and the text says plainly that the second sort will not manage this particular move.

The stroke is strong in an even place and stands at the base of the upper trigram Qian, the first line in the figure to have cleared the mountain and entered the open sky above it. That is the structural reason the withdrawal has become voluntary. Below, in Gen, retreat was obstructed and the whole difficulty lay in getting out at all. Here the way is open and the only thing holding the subject is that he would rather stay, which is a smaller obstacle and a harder one.

Nine in the fourth place is a favourable line that most querents will not want. The reading describes leaving something the person still likes, at a moment when leaving is entirely possible and no longer forced, and it makes the good fortune conditional on character rather than on circumstance. The text is blunt that not everyone can do this. A small man, in the classic's own phrase, cannot attain to it, which is a statement about the strength the move requires.

That framing belongs to the period's way of sorting people, and it is left standing here rather than smoothed over. What it is being used to say is that a voluntary withdrawal costs something a compelled one does not, because there is nothing outside the person to attribute it to. They have to supply the reason themselves and then live inside a decision nobody made them take, with the thing they left still visible and still liked.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Qian becomes Xun and the figure becomes Development, King Wen 53, gradual advance through ordered stages, a tree growing on a mountain. The destination answers the question this line leaves open, which is what a willing retreat is actually for. Ground given up on purpose is the beginning of a slow advance somewhere else, and the classic files that advance under a figure whose whole teaching is that it cannot be hurried.