Divinity Atlas

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Stopping the Stoppage and Tying It to a Clump of Mulberry

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Stopping the Stoppage and Tying It to a Clump of Mulberry

The fifth line is where Standstill is actually brought to an end, and the text spends most of its words on how insecure that ending is. Legge's translation shows the subject stopping the stoppage and obstruction, with good fortune to the great man, and then puts words in his mouth: we may perish, we may perish. Held in that fear, the situation becomes firm, as if bound to a clump of bushy mulberry trees. The small commentary attributes the good fortune to the correctness of the position and says nothing further, leaving the anxiety in the text to do its own work.

Firm, central and correctly placed in the upper trigram Qian, this is the ruling line of the hexagram and the only position in it with both the standing and the correctness to reverse the closure. The mulberry image is agricultural and specific. A mulberry stump throws up a dense clump of shoots with roots that grip, and a thing tied to it is tied to something that holds because it is many rooted rather than because it is large.

What the line refuses to do is celebrate. Standstill has not been overthrown here, only stopped, and the difference matters to the reading of the sixth line that follows. The great man's repeated fear of perishing is not a failure of nerve but the mechanism by which the recovery is made to hold, and the text treats that vigilance as the thing being credited when it promises good fortune.

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