Duration, Line 2

The second line is the shortest in the hexagram and among the shortest in the classic. Legge's translation gives only that all occasion for repentance disappears, and the commentary on the image explains it in a single clause: the subject can abide long in the due mean. There is no image, no instruction and no promise of gain. Something that would have been regretted stops being available to regret, and the text moves on.

The brevity fits the subject. Duration in this figure is not achievement but continuance, and continuance done properly leaves very little to describe. Where the first line pressed for permanence at the outset and was told that nothing was advantageous, the second simply holds a middle position over time, and the result is the quiet removal of a fault rather than the arrival of a benefit.

The stroke is strong in an even seat, which the ordinary rule counts as incorrect, and it holds the centre of the lower trigram Xun. Centrality is doing all of the work and the text says so through the commentary rather than through the line itself. A firm line in a soft seat would ordinarily be a mismatch worth remarking on, and in a hexagram about lasting, occupying the mean for long enough is treated as sufficient to dissolve the mismatch on its own.

Nine in the second place asks a querent to keep doing what they are already doing. The whole of the text is that occasion for repentance disappears, and the commentary attributes that to the capacity to abide long in the due mean. Nothing is promised beyond the removal of a regret, and for a reading that is often the most valuable outcome available, because a great many difficulties resolve by being outlasted rather than by being solved.

The counsel is therefore against intervention. A person holding a middle position steadily is in the one situation this hexagram approves of without qualification, and the temptation the line addresses is the belief that a problem must have an action taken against it. Here the action is the waiting, and the fault the querent expected to answer for is being dissolved by time and position rather than by effort.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Xun becomes Gen and the figure becomes Small Preponderance, King Wen 62, where small things may be done and great ones may not. That destination reads as a boundary rather than a reversal. The steadiness which dissolves a regret is not a mandate for anything larger, and a querent who takes the second line's ease as permission to attempt something ambitious ends up in the figure that counsels the bird to fly low.