The Count of Ji and a Brightness Deliberately Hidden

The fifth line is the only one in the hexagram that names a person. Legge's translation gives the darkening of the light of the count of Ji, and adds that it will be advantageous to be firm and correct. The count is remembered as a man who kept his integrity under a ruler he could not correct, by putting his own intelligence out of sight, and the classic treats that concealment not as a compromise but as the course the position required.

That position belongs to the period the text comes from and should be read as such rather than quietly generalised. The alternative to concealment at such a court was not disagreement but destruction, and the line is composed for a reader who takes that as given. What survives the change of setting is the structural claim underneath it: the text separates what a person is from what a person is seen to be, and puts correctness entirely in the first. Firmness here is invisible by design, and the line says so without treating the invisibility as a loss.

Structurally this is a yielding stroke in an odd place, incorrect by the ordinary rule, yet central in the upper trigram Kun and immediately below the topmost line where the classic puts the dark ruler. Nothing about the position is comfortable and its nearness to the top is the danger in it. Being central is what allows the line to hold anything at all, and being incorrectly placed is why what it holds cannot be shown to anybody.