Removing the Cause Instead of Resisting the Effect

Go for the root. Someone drawing this changing line is being told that the trouble in front of them can be addressed at its source rather than at the point where it keeps surfacing, and that doing so will succeed where direct resistance has not. The image of a boar whose tusks remain but whose aggression has been removed describes a solution leaving the visible situation much as it was while changing what drives it entirely.

The practical difficulty is one of identification. Resisting a symptom is obvious and available; finding the cause underneath it is neither, and a reading landing here usually asks a querent to look further back than the point where the problem announces itself. The good fortune the text promises attaches to the depth of the intervention rather than to its strength.

Central to the upper trigram Gen and the ruling position of the hexagram despite standing incorrectly in an odd place, this line represents restraint at its most intelligent. What it counsels is not more force applied to a persistent difficulty but a different point of application altogether, chosen so that the difficulty stops being produced rather than merely being contained. Where such a point can be found, the line promises it will hold without further effort, which is what separates this counsel from ordinary persistence.