Soft Flesh, and the Nose That Vanishes into the Bite

Where the opening line met a fault that had not yet moved, the second meets one that offers no resistance whatever. Legge's translation gives a figure biting through soft flesh and going on to bite away the nose, and then declares that there is no error. Two things are happening in one image. The flesh is soft because the offender yields at once, and the vanished nose belongs to the punisher, who has been carried by the very ease of the work past the point the offence actually asked for.

The hexagram treats punishment as a means of clearing an obstruction, and an obstruction that gives way immediately removes the friction that would otherwise regulate the force applied to it. That is the whole hazard of this position. Resistance teaches a judge how hard to press; its absence teaches nothing, and the bite continues under its own momentum after the obstruction has already gone.

A yin stroke correctly occupies this even position, and it is central within the lower trigram Zhen, which is why the excess pictured here does not become blame. Centrality supplies the corrective the image itself lacks, so the overshoot is recognised and stops. The line is not saying that going too far is harmless. It is saying that a properly placed and central judge notices the overshoot, halts it, and is therefore not held at fault for the momentum that an unresisting case produced.