The second line separates two people standing in the same stagnant situation and gives them different verdicts. Legge's translation shows the subject patient and obedient, with good fortune to a small man who comports himself so, and success to a great man who bears the distress and obstruction as they require. The small commentary supplies the working criterion: the great man does not allow himself to be disordered by the herd of small men. Compliance in outward conduct, with no corresponding change in what one actually is, is what carries the line.
Central and correctly placed in the lower trigram Kun, this line holds the one steady position among the three yielding lines that make up the closed lower half of the figure. Its correctness is real but it is correctness under conditions that reward nothing. The Judgment of the hexagram observes that the great have gone and the small have come, and the second line is where a capable person has to work out how to live inside that inversion without either fighting it uselessly or being absorbed by it.
The counsel is deliberately unheroic. There is no call to resist openly, no promise that endurance will be recognized, and no suggestion that the situation is about to improve. What the line protects is interior order, the quality that will still be intact when the obstruction lifts, and it treats outward patience as the price of keeping it rather than as a virtue in its own right.