The Family, Line 5

The fifth line brings the ruler into the figure and finds him at home. Legge's translation describes the influence of the king reaching his family, says there need be no anxiety, and gives good fortune. The word carrying the line is the reaching. A king is the one person in the classic whose authority is never in question anywhere else, and this line is interested in the single place where authority of that kind does not apply automatically.

The stroke is strong, central and correctly placed at the ruling seat of the upper trigram Xun, and it answers the second line, yielding and central in the lower trigram. The classic builds the whole hexagram on that pair. Two central lines, each correctly placed, one holding the inner position and one the outer, are the structure the figure calls a family, and the fifth line's good fortune is less a personal quality than a confirmation that the pairing is holding.

The absence of anxiety is the specific gift of this station. Households are held together by rule at the first line, by severity at the third and by wealth at the fourth, and every one of those has to be attended to or it stops working. What arrives here does not. An arrangement in which the person at the head reaches the people under them without effort has stopped needing to be managed, and the classic marks that by removing the one burden it usually leaves a ruler carrying.

Nine in the fifth place describes command that no longer has to be used. The king reaches his family, there is nothing to be anxious about, and the outcome is good. A querent drawing it usually holds responsibility over people who are close to them, and the reading concerns the difference between running such an arrangement and simply being trusted inside it.

The counsel is to stop working the position. Anxiety is what the line explicitly removes, and it removes it before promising anything, which puts the order of operations on record: the situation improves once the person at its head stops managing it as though it might fail at any moment. That is a hard instruction for anybody who arrived at the fifth line by way of the third, where severity was the instrument, and it is aimed at precisely that reader.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Xun becomes Gen and the figure becomes Grace, King Wen 22, the classic's study of form and adornment, fire lighting a mountain from below. Read from the ruling line of The Family, the transformation is a fair warning as well as a compliment. Authority that no longer needs to act begins to consist largely of how it appears, and Grace is unusually honest about how much a fine surface can carry and about the point past which it is carrying nothing at all.