Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Returning Again and Again Without the Turn Ever Holding

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Returning Again and Again Without the Turn Ever Holding

A return made over and over is what this third position describes, and Legge's translation marks the situation as perilous while withholding blame from it. This is the only place in the hexagram where the movement is both genuine and unstable. The person represented here does turn back, repeatedly, and each turn is real; what fails is the holding, so that the same ground has to be recovered again and again.

The instability is written into the position. A yielding line stands here in an odd place, incorrect by the standard rule, and it occupies the top of the lower trigram Zhen, movement at its most restless point. Commentary reads the danger as belonging to the character of the movement rather than to any wrong intention: the impulse to return is sound, the constancy needed to stay returned is not.

What the text refuses to do is condemn. There will be no error, it says, which places repeated relapse in a different category altogether from the flat refusal the topmost line will describe. Return is a hexagram of natural rebirth, and natural rebirth is rarely a single clean event. A turn that keeps having to be made is still a turn, and the tradition carefully preserves the distinction between an unsteady return and no return at all.

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