The Illness That Needs No Medicine, Only Time

Legge's translation places at the fifth position a subject free from insincerity who has nonetheless fallen ill, directs that no medicine be used, and promises occasion for joy in the recovery that follows. The instruction is startling in a book that generally counsels action, and it depends entirely on the diagnosis: the trouble did not arise from anything wrong in the sufferer, so nothing in the sufferer needs correcting.

This is the ruling line of the hexagram, a strong stroke correctly placed in an odd position and central to the upper trigram Qian. That authority is what allows the text to prescribe inaction so confidently. Commentary reads the medicine as any forced remedy, and treats reaching for one as the mistake, since an intervention aimed at a fault that is not there can only disturb something already sound.

Placed within the figure's arc, the fifth position completes the argument the third began. The third showed misfortune arriving at the innocent from outside; the fifth shows what to do about it, which is very nearly nothing. Left alone, an affliction with no root in the sufferer runs its course and passes, and the joy the text promises belongs to a recovery nobody had to engineer.