The Abysmal, Line 6

The topmost line describes a punishment. The line text has the subject bound with cords and ropes and placed in a thicket of thorns, and states that in three years he does not learn the course for himself, with evil as the outcome. Binding a prisoner and confining him within a thorn enclosure was a penal practice of the period the text comes from, and it is given here as the text has it rather than softened into metaphor. A Zhou reader would have understood a specific sentence, not a picture of feeling trapped.

What the line does with that material is where its weight lies. The three years are the same measure of a full cycle the classic uses elsewhere for a course that has hardened into a settled one, and the text places the failure not in the confinement but in what does not happen during it. The subject does not learn the course. Danger that began as circumstance has been made permanent by the person inside it, and the verdict of evil attaches to that, which is why this line closes a hexagram whose other lines repeatedly show peril being kept survivable.

The stroke is yielding in an even place, correct by the ordinary rule, at the very top of the upper trigram Kan and past the ruling fifth line that held the water level. Correctness of position saves nothing at the extremity. Set against the contained pit of the line below it, the sixth shows what the same danger becomes when nobody is holding the level and nobody is learning.

Six at the top is the hexagram's account of danger that has been allowed to set. The querent is shown bound and hedged about with thorns for three years without having learned what the situation required of them, and the misfortune the text names follows from the second half of that rather than the first. Read divinatorially, this warns of a difficulty that stopped being an event a long time ago and has become the shape of a life, sustained by a course nobody has reconsidered.

The imagery is the Zhou period's own penal vocabulary, cords and a thorn enclosure being an actual sentence rather than a figure of speech, and it is reported here as the text gives it. Its usefulness to a present day reading survives the change of setting because the real subject of the line is the three years and not the thorns. What the text finds culpable is the absence of learning across a full cycle, in a hexagram that has just spent five lines showing that peril can be entered, endured, waited out, worked around and held at a level.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Kan becomes Xun and the figure becomes Dispersion, King Wen 59, in which what has hardened is broken up and scattered. Read from the top of The Abysmal, that is the remedy this line will not name for itself. The thing that has set has to be dissolved rather than escaped, and nothing at this station comes loose while the course that produced it stays unexamined.