Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Taking Nothing on Herself and Attending to the Food

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Taking Nothing on Herself and Attending to the Food

The second line describes a woman of the household providing the food and taking no initiative of her own, and says that firm correctness brings good fortune. Legge's translation places her in the central place, which is the term the classic uses for the middle line of a trigram, and the reading turns on that word rather than on the meal. The division of labour assumed here is the division of a Zhou household, and it is set down as the text has it rather than adjusted.

That framing belongs to the period the text comes from and is best read as its own, because the argument the line makes does not depend on it. What the classic asserts is that the centre of an arrangement is not where initiative is generated, and that the member holding the centre is doing something other than deciding. This stroke is yielding, correctly placed in an even seat and central in the lower trigram Li, which by the ordinary rules is the strongest combination of qualities available anywhere in the lower half of a figure.

The good fortune is made conditional on firmness, and that is where the line stops being merely descriptive. Occupying a central position without asserting anything is a virtue only if the person occupying it is unmovable in some respect, and the text names correctness as the thing that must not give way. Read against the fifth line, where the king reaches his family, the second is the household's other pole of authority, and the classic sets it the same requirement it sets the ruler.

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