Standstill, Line 6

The final line completes what the fifth began. Legge's translation shows the overthrow and removal of the condition of distress and obstruction, notes that before this there was that condition, and states that hereafter there will be joy. The small commentary asks a rhetorical question that carries the hexagram's whole argument about time: the obstruction having reached its end, it is overthrown, so how could it be prolonged? Standstill is not defeated by anyone in this line. It exhausts itself, and the line is where that exhaustion becomes visible.

Firm at the top of the upper trigram Qian, beyond the ruling fifth place, the line occupies the position that in most hexagrams marks a condition carried past its proper term. Here that structural fact works in the reader's favor rather than against it, because the condition being carried past its term is the stagnation itself. What is excessive at the top of Standstill is Standstill, and its excess is precisely what ends it.

The sequence from the fifth line to the sixth is worth reading as a pair. The fifth stopped the obstruction and immediately warned how easily the stop could fail; the sixth records the removal as accomplished and puts joy after it rather than beside it. Nothing in the hexagram pretends that the closed time was short or that it cost nothing. What the closing line asserts is only that it was never permanent, and that its ending is as much a matter of course as its arrival was.

Nine at the top is the resolution of Standstill and reads as straightforward relief. As a changing line it tells a querent that a closed, obstructed period is genuinely over rather than merely easing, and that what follows it is joy. The commentary supplies the reasoning a querent most needs at the end of a hard stretch: an obstruction that has run its full course cannot be prolonged, so the recovery does not depend on continued effort in the way the fifth line's did.

Flipping this firm stroke to yielding changes the upper trigram Qian into Dui, lake, and lake over earth gives Gathering Together, King Wen 45, a hexagram about people assembling around a center once there is something worth assembling for. The transformation reads as the natural next question. When the closure lifts, the dispersal it caused becomes reversible, and the figure that follows is the one that describes coming back together rather than simply being unobstructed.

A reading landing here counsels the querent to treat the ending as real and to act on it socially. The companions who withdrew together at the first line, root by tangled root, are the same people the transformed hexagram gathers, and the joy named here is not solitary. What was closed has opened, and the fitting response is to reassemble rather than to go on behaving as though the obstruction were still in place.