A Little of the Deliverance Sought, and No More Than a Little

The second line is the first firm thing in the hexagram. Legge's translation places the subject in the defile in peril and grants that he will get a little of the deliverance he seeks, with the commentary noting that he has not yet come out from his place. Both halves of that matter. Something is gained, it is explicitly a small something, and the person gaining it is still inside the danger while the gaining happens.

This stroke is strong and central in the lower trigram Kan, the single yang line held between two yielding ones that gives the trigram its whole character. Centrality is what allows the small gain. The line has kept its bearings, which the opening line had lost, and somebody who knows where they are can improve their position by degrees even when they cannot leave it. By the ordinary rule the placement is incorrect, a strong line in an even seat, and that incorrectness is why the gain is partial rather than complete.

The judgement of the hexagram turns on sincerity carried through danger, and this is the line where that becomes practical rather than aspirational. What the text refuses to offer is deliverance itself. It offers a little of it, which in a doubled trigram of peril is a real result, and it declines to let a reader mistake one small correct movement for a way out of the whole situation.