Sorrow in the Advance, and the Blessing From the Grandmother

The second line advances and grieves at the same time. Legge's translation gives the appearance of advancing joined to sorrow, attaches good fortune to firm correctness, and then supplies an unexpected turn: the subject will receive great blessing from his grandmother. The commentary on the image credits the outcome to his being in the central place, and in the seat proper to him.

The blessing arrives through the ancestral line, and that is the religious setting the text was composed in, where the dead of a family were petitioned and were held to answer. It is left standing here as the text has it. What the line does with that setting is the part that carries across the centuries, and it is this: help comes from a quarter the subject has not been working on. Every effort in the reading has gone into the advance, and the sorrow is attached to the advance, while the relief comes from behind rather than from ahead.

Structurally this is the strongest yielding position in the lower half of the figure. It is central and correctly placed in the earth trigram Kun. What it does not have is a correspondence above, because the fifth line is yielding as well, and two soft lines do not answer each other. That absence is both why the line is sorrowful and why the support has to arrive from somewhere other than the seat of power.