Divinity Atlas

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Viewing the Father's Decay Indulgently and the Regret in Going On

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Viewing the Father's Decay Indulgently and the Regret in Going On

One place in this hexagram is where the repair does not happen, and it is the fourth. Legge's translation shows a son viewing indulgently the troubles caused by his father, and states that if he goes forward he will find cause to regret it, while the Little Symbolism adds that going forward will not succeed. Indulgence here is not kindness. It is the decision to let a known fault stand and to proceed as though the decision had no consequences, and the text closes off that route in two separate sentences.

The line is yielding in an even place and therefore correct by the standard rule, which makes its failure instructive. Correctness of position guarantees nothing about the use made of it. Sitting at the base of the upper trigram Gen, the still mountain, this line has left the active lower trigram and entered the region where the hexagram's work should be consolidated, and it consolidates nothing.

Read against the third line below, which spends too much energy and is absolved, the fourth spends none and is not. That contrast is the clearest statement of what Work on the Decayed values. The hexagram was never about avoiding the discomfort of correction. It was about whether the decay is met at all, and this line records what follows when it is politely ignored.

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