The hexagram ends with the heaviest penalty it contains. Legge's translation shows one wearing the cangue, the wooden collar locked about the neck and shoulders, and deprived of his ears, and gives the plain verdict that there will be evil. Set against the opening line, where a light restraint hid only the toes, the shape of the whole hexagram becomes visible: the same trouble, left uncorrected through five stages, has grown from something the stocks could hold into something that requires a collar.
The lost ears carry the explanation rather than merely the injury. Hearing is how warnings arrive, and the punishment removes the faculty that was never used. This is not arbitrary cruelty in the imagery. It states the cause of the outcome in the form of the outcome, and the reader is meant to trace the failure backward through every earlier line that offered a cheaper correction and was ignored.
A yang stroke occupies this even position at the top of the upper trigram Li, past the ruling fifth place and beyond the reach of its central measure. Where the fifth line held the middle, the sixth has left it. The evil named here is not a judgement on the severity of the sentence, which has become proportionate to the offence, but on the entire sequence that made such a sentence necessary. Biting Through closes by showing what it costs to have refused every smaller bite.