Innocence Pushed One Step Past Its Moment

The closing line of Wu Wang describes a subject still free from insincerity who will nonetheless fall into error by acting, with no advantage in any direction. Legge's translation does not withdraw the innocence; it withdraws the occasion for it. The sincerity is intact and the moment for expressing it has gone, and the hexagram ends by insisting that those are separate questions.

Position carries the whole meaning. A strong line stands at the very top in an even place, incorrect by the rule, beyond the ruling fifth position and past the point where the upper trigram Qian has anywhere further to rise. Movement from here is movement for its own sake, and the tradition reads the error not as a defect of character but as a defect of timing, which is why the text can call the subject blameless and the action mistaken in the same breath.

Ending here gives the figure a boundary it would otherwise lack. Wu Wang promises supreme success to natural, unpremeditated rightness, and its final line marks where that promise stops. Innocence carried past its own moment turns into recklessness, and the last word of the hexagram is that even a clean impulse has to answer the question of whether now is when it belongs.