Divinity Atlas

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Losing the Ram in the Ease of the Position

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Losing the Ram in the Ease of the Position

The fifth line gives up the animal. Legge's translation shows the subject losing his ram-like strength in the ease of his position and states that there will be no occasion for repentance, while the commentary on the image observes that the place is not the appropriate one for him. Something is genuinely lost here, and the text declines to treat the loss as a misfortune, which is the whole of what makes this line interesting.

The position accounts for both halves of that. A yielding stroke occupies the ruling seat of the upper trigram Zhen, holding the centre of a hexagram whose entire character is force, and by the ordinary rule a soft line in an odd place is incorrectly placed. The commentary says exactly that. Yet the ease the text names is real: a yielding line at the ruling seat is not required to butt at anything, and the four strong lines beneath it do not have to be driven.

Read against the third and sixth lines, both of which put a ram into a fence, this one is the figure's alternative. The ram is what gets caught. A person who mislays their capacity for display, at a station where display is not needed, has lost the thing that would have entangled them, and the text records no regret because nothing in the situation requires what went missing.

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