Employing Neighbors Without Riches, and the Use of Arms

The fifth line is where Modesty answers the charge that humility is weakness. Legge's translation describes one who, without being rich, is able to employ his neighbours, adds that arms may advantageously be used, and concludes that all movements will be advantageous. Wealth is the ordinary instrument for securing cooperation, and this line does without it. What draws the neighbours is the character of the person at the centre, which the hexagram has spent four lines establishing.

Yielding in an odd position, this stroke is incorrectly placed by the letter of the positional rule, yet it holds the central place of the upper trigram Kun and the seat of rule in the hexagram. Modesty puts a soft line where a text of authority would ordinarily want a strong one, and the reading takes that as deliberate: a ruler in this hexagram governs by being joined rather than by compelling, so the softness is the qualification for the seat rather than a defect in it.

The permission to use force sits inside that logic instead of contradicting it. Someone who has never bought compliance and never displayed power is believed when they finally move against genuine wrong, because the movement cannot be read as ambition. That credibility is what the line is actually describing. Arms used from this position correct something; the same arms used by a ruler who had been trading favours all along would only announce that the trading had run out.