Constancy Fortunate in a Wife and Evil in a Husband, as the Text Has It

The fifth line is the hexagram's most direct statement and it arrives framed in the household terms of its own period. Legge's translation has the subject continuously maintaining the virtue in question, then splits the outcome by role: in a wife this will be fortunate, in a husband it will be evil. The commentary on the image is more explicit still. The wife's part is to follow with an unchanged mind to the end of her life, while the husband must decide what is right and lay down the rule accordingly, and for him to follow as a wife does is evil.

That division of roles belongs to the society the text was composed in and to the commentarial tradition that grew up around it, and it is set down here as the text has it rather than paraphrased away. What the line is doing underneath the framing is distinguishing two different modes of constancy, and the distinction survives the framing entirely. One mode keeps faith with a course already settled. The other has to keep determining what the course is, and holding rigidly to a fixed answer is a failure of the second mode rather than a success of it.

The stroke is yielding in an odd place, incorrect by the ordinary rule, at the ruling seat of the upper trigram Zhen. Softness in the seat that must judge is the structural version of the same point. A ruler exercising only the constancy of holding on occupies a position whose duty is to determine, and the text names that mismatch by its outcome rather than by any description of it.