Crying Out, Then Laughing, and the Union Finally Won

The fifth line resolves the tension the third and fourth lines built. Legge's translation shows the subject first crying out and weeping, then afterward laughing, a union delayed by great obstacles but ultimately achieved once those obstacles are overcome, adding that a great host is needed to meet the one sought, but that they do at last meet. The emotional arc compressed into this single line, distress giving way to joy, mirrors the hexagram's own arc from an open gate through rivalry and abandoned struggle to the fellowship this line finally secures.

This is the central line of the upper trigram Qian, the ruling position of the hexagram by virtue of centrality and correctness together, a yang line rightly placed at an odd position and honored as the seat from which the whole figure's authority radiates. That the ruling line should itself weep before it laughs is telling: even the most rightly placed strength in the hexagram must pass through real difficulty, the standoff of the third line, the abandoned assault of the fourth, before the fellowship the Judgment promises is actually reached.

Read within the hexagram's full sequence, the fifth line answers the second: the sole yielding line every other line sought is here finally attained by the hexagram's own ruler, but only after obstacles considerable enough to require a great host to overcome them. The tears are not weakness. They are the true cost of a union worth crying out for in the first place.