Noble Retreat at the Summit, Where Nothing Is Left in Doubt

The topmost line completes the figure without difficulty, which is rare in the classic. Legge's translation shows the subject retiring in a noble way and calls it advantageous in every respect, while the commentary on the image adds that there is no doubt about the course to be taken. Elsewhere the sixth place is the station of excess, where a good thing is carried past its limit and turns into its opposite. In Retreat it is the one place where the movement of the hexagram and the movement of the line agree.

The reason is that this figure is about going, and the top line is furthest gone. A strong stroke at the extremity of the upper trigram Qian has the whole distance behind it and nothing above it left to be caught by. The first line was a tail with no ground gained and no room to move; this is the same withdrawal seen from the far end, with everything that made it perilous down there converted into space up here.

The absence of doubt is the substance of the line rather than a flourish on it. Every other place in the hexagram is deciding something under pressure: whether to move, what to keep, who is holding one back, whether one is willing. At this station those questions are settled by the fact of having already gone, and the nobility the text credits is not a manner adopted for the occasion but the shape a withdrawal takes when nothing has been left undone behind it.