Difficulty at the Beginning, Line 6

The sixth and topmost line closes the hexagram at the point of its greatest strain. Legge describes the subject with the horses of his chariot obliged to retreat, weeping tears of blood in streams, the most severe image the hexagram offers, echoing the second and fourth lines' horses in retreat but here without the second line's eventual union or the fourth line's renewed advance to relieve it. Difficulty, having run through every line of the hexagram, reaches its extremity at the top with no line beyond it to answer.

The line occupies the topmost place of the upper trigram Kan, water and danger carried to their furthest point, with no ruling seat beneath it and no position above to offer relief. Chinese commentary reads this placement as the natural conclusion of a hexagram built entirely around obstruction at a beginning: difficulty that has not resolved by the fifth line does not simply vanish at the sixth, it intensifies, since the topmost place carries the accumulated weight of everything unresolved beneath it.

Commentary tradition nonetheless resists reading this line as pure catastrophe. The tears described are extreme, but the line's placement at the very end of a hexagram devoted to beginnings implies what lies beyond it: a difficulty this thorough, endured to its limit, exhausts itself rather than persisting forever. The line's teaching is that when birth pangs of any true beginning reach their worst, only endurance carries a subject through to whatever follows, since the hexagram itself offers no further line to promise otherwise.

Six at the top is divinatorially the hexagram's most severe line, and a reading landing here tells the querent that a difficulty long endured has reached its most acute point. The image of horses obliged to retreat and tears falling in streams offers no relief within the line itself, echoing the second and fourth lines' retreating horses but here without either the union the second line eventually promises or the advantage the fourth line's renewed advance secures.

The line's position, topmost in the upper trigram Kan with nothing above it to answer to and no ruling seat beneath it to anchor its conduct, is read in commentary tradition as the accumulated weight of every difficulty the hexagram has carried from its very first line, arriving here with nowhere further to be deferred. A reading landing on this line often marks a genuinely difficult culmination, a trial, loss, or setback that has been building throughout a longer process now reaching its hardest point.

Divinatory tradition nonetheless reads the line as an endpoint rather than a permanent condition, since the hexagram itself supplies no further line beyond it: difficulty pressed to its true extremity, in this reading, exhausts rather than perpetuates itself. The counsel offered is unglamorous but real, that endurance through this specific extremity, rather than any clever action, is what the line asks of the querent, since the hexagram's own structure guarantees that what follows a beginning this difficult is, at minimum, no longer its beginning.