Tears in Torrents at the Ruling Seat of the Upper Brightness

The fifth line is the hexagram's ruler and it is found weeping. Legge's translation shows the subject with tears flowing in torrents and groaning in sorrow, and then gives good fortune, which reads as a contradiction until the position is taken into account. The commentary attributes the fortune to the line occupying the place of a king or prince, so the grief is not incidental to the good outcome. It is what a person in that seat does when the situation deserves it.

The stroke is yielding in an odd place, incorrect by the ordinary rule, and it holds the centre of the upper trigram Li. Softness in the ruling seat of a figure about dependent light is not the weakness the ordinary rule would suggest. The middle line of Li is the yielding one, held between two firm strokes, and a ruler who is that line is a ruler whose clarity comes from what he is attached to rather than from any hardness of his own.

Read against its neighbours the line answers both of them. The fourth burned out on arrival and was thrown away; the sixth will go out on campaign and come back commended. Between the two stands a ruler with clarity enough to see the whole of what is happening and no defence at all against feeling it, and the classic treats that as the fortunate condition rather than as a lapse of composure.