Standstill Overthrown, and Why It Could Not Be Prolonged

The final line completes what the fifth began. Legge's translation shows the overthrow and removal of the condition of distress and obstruction, notes that before this there was that condition, and states that hereafter there will be joy. The small commentary asks a rhetorical question that carries the hexagram's whole argument about time: the obstruction having reached its end, it is overthrown, so how could it be prolonged? Standstill is not defeated by anyone in this line. It exhausts itself, and the line is where that exhaustion becomes visible.

Firm at the top of the upper trigram Qian, beyond the ruling fifth place, the line occupies the position that in most hexagrams marks a condition carried past its proper term. Here that structural fact works in the reader's favor rather than against it, because the condition being carried past its term is the stagnation itself. What is excessive at the top of Standstill is Standstill, and its excess is precisely what ends it.

The sequence from the fifth line to the sixth is worth reading as a pair. The fifth stopped the obstruction and immediately warned how easily the stop could fail; the sixth records the removal as accomplished and puts joy after it rather than beside it. Nothing in the hexagram pretends that the closed time was short or that it cost nothing. What the closing line asserts is only that it was never permanent, and that its ending is as much a matter of course as its arrival was.