Darkening of the Light, Line 6

The topmost line is the darkness itself, and the classic disposes of it in a single movement. Legge's translation gives a case in which there is no brightness but only obscurity, and says the subject had at first ascended to the top of the sky and will hereafter go into the earth. Everything else in the hexagram describes people managing under a darkening. This line describes the thing doing the darkening, and it describes it entirely as a trajectory.

The figure puts earth above fire, so the highest place in it is the deepest point of the obscurity, and a stroke at the top of the upper trigram Kun stands as far from the light of the lower trigram as the hexagram allows. It is yielding in an even place, correct by the ordinary rule, which is one of the sharper ironies in the classic. Correct placement confers nothing at this station. The line falls not because it is badly seated but because it has nowhere further up to go.

The two halves of the movement are the point. A darkness of this kind does not begin as darkness. It begins as something that rose, and the height it reached is what makes the descent complete rather than partial. The classic passes no sentence, names no punishment and supplies no agent of the fall. It states the arc and leaves it there, with the fifth line, which had to live beside this one, holding the only firmness anywhere in the upper half of the figure.

Six at the top is not addressed to the querent the way the other five lines are. It shows a total obscurity, and a subject who climbed to the height of the sky and whose course now runs into the earth. Drawn in a reading, it usually describes the situation rather than the person: something that has darkened everything around it has also reached the end of its own rise, and the line is a statement about how long that will last.

That makes it a difficult line to act on and an important one to read correctly. It counsels no resistance, names no moment of collapse, and gives no method for hastening one. What it supplies is perspective for the people described by the other five lines, whose choices about flight, speed, confrontation, exit and concealment are all being made under something the classic considers temporary in a way that its subject plainly does not.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Kun becomes Gen and the figure becomes Grace, King Wen 22, fire beneath a mountain and light thrown upward across a form. The transformation is a comment on how such things look while they last. What ascended to the top of the sky was ornament laid over an obscurity, and Grace is the classic's own study of adornment, of what it can honestly carry and of how much of a situation a reader should ever expect appearance to account for.