Occasion for Repentance Simply Disappears, and the Text Says No More

The second line is the shortest in the hexagram and among the shortest in the classic. Legge's translation gives only that all occasion for repentance disappears, and the commentary on the image explains it in a single clause: the subject can abide long in the due mean. There is no image, no instruction and no promise of gain. Something that would have been regretted stops being available to regret, and the text moves on.

The brevity fits the subject. Duration in this figure is not achievement but continuance, and continuance done properly leaves very little to describe. Where the first line pressed for permanence at the outset and was told that nothing was advantageous, the second simply holds a middle position over time, and the result is the quiet removal of a fault rather than the arrival of a benefit.

The stroke is strong in an even seat, which the ordinary rule counts as incorrect, and it holds the centre of the lower trigram Xun. Centrality is doing all of the work and the text says so through the commentary rather than through the line itself. A firm line in a soft seat would ordinarily be a mismatch worth remarking on, and in a hexagram about lasting, occupying the mean for long enough is treated as sufficient to dissolve the mismatch on its own.