Walking Among the Yielding Lines and Turning Back Alone

Isolation is what marks this fourth position out from every other in the hexagram. Legge's translation shows a figure walking in the middle of the other divided lines and returning alone to the proper path. Five of the six lines here are yielding, and this one stands among them without any of them moving with it. The text offers no promise of good fortune and no warning of misfortune, only the bare fact of the solitary turn.

Position explains the loneliness precisely. This is a yielding line correctly placed in an even position at the foot of the upper trigram Kun, and it is the only line in the figure standing in direct correspondence with the single strong stroke at the very bottom. Its answer lies far below it, across the whole width of the hexagram, and none of its immediate neighbours share it. The line returns toward something real that happens to be out of everyone else's sight.

The absence of any judgment in the text is itself the point. The hexagram has already promised that friends come without blame, yet this line finds none, and the tradition still counts its conduct proper. Rightness here does not depend on company or on visible reward, which is why the position reads as the quiet moral centre of Return rather than as its most fortunate station.