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Letting the Display Go Without Losing the Substance

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Letting the Display Go Without Losing the Substance

Six in the fifth place describes somebody whose forcefulness has quietly drained away, and tells them it does not matter. The ram is lost in the ease of the position, and no repentance follows. A querent drawing this often reads it as a warning that they have gone soft, and the text is saying something more precise than that: the strength which has gone was the visible, butting kind, and the situation no longer calls for that kind.

The structure is unusual and the commentary flags it. A yielding stroke sits at the ruling seat of the trigram of thunder, incorrectly placed by the ordinary rule, governing four firm lines it never had to subdue. Ease is the operative word in the line. Where a position carries authority of its own, force added to it is redundant, and the text quietly removes the redundancy without asking whether the person minded losing it.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Zhen becomes Dui and the figure becomes Breakthrough, King Wen 43, in which a single yielding line at the top is resolutely removed by the five strong lines beneath. That is a caution folded into a favourable reading. Ease which goes on long enough stops being ease and becomes the one soft thing everybody below is pushing against, and the difference is whether the position is still doing work the lost strength was never needed for.

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