Sincerity Held With Dignity at the Close of the Figure

The topmost line closes the hexagram on character rather than on arrangement. Legge's translation shows its subject possessed of sincerity and arrayed in majesty, and says that in the end there will be good fortune. Both halves are load-bearing. Sincerity by itself would leave a household with nothing anybody defers to, and majesty by itself would be the display the third line has already condemned, so the line insists on the pair and gives neither alone.

This is the one stroke in the figure that is not correctly placed, strong in an even seat at the very top of the upper trigram Xun. The irregularity is doing work. Every other line in The Family stands where the rules say it should, which is the structural version of each member of a household occupying their proper station, and the last line steps outside that scheme in order to say what holds once the scheme runs out. Position accounts for the first five lines. It cannot account for this one.

The delay built into the verdict is the other half of the point. Good fortune comes in the end and not now, because dignity of this kind cannot be asserted or demonstrated on demand. It accumulates in other people over a long time, until it no longer needs asserting at all. The classic has spent five lines describing how a household is ordered from the outside, and finishes by naming what has to be true inside the person standing at the top of it.