Duration, Line 3

The third line breaks the hexagram's single requirement. Legge's translation shows one who does not continuously maintain his virtue, adds that there are those who will impute this to him as a disgrace, and concludes that however firm he may be there will be ground for regret. The commentary on the image is shorter and harder: he does not continuously maintain his virtue, and no one will accept him.

Where the cost falls is the striking part. The line does not describe a wrong action, a loss, or any external misfortune. It describes a character that will not hold its shape, and the consequence is entirely social. Other people impute the disgrace and other people decline to have him. In a figure whose whole subject is what endures, the thing that fails is the one thing the hexagram asks a person to supply out of themselves.

The stroke is strong in an odd place, correct by the ordinary rule, at the top of the lower trigram Xun. Correctness of position again proves no defence, because the fault lies not in the seat but in the movement through time that no seat can describe. A line at the top of its trigram stands at a hinge, and this hexagram measures a person precisely by whether they are the same at the hinge as they were below it.

Nine in the third place addresses reputation and does it without softening. A querent drawing it is being told that inconsistency of conduct has been noticed, that others are treating it as a disgrace, and that firmness applied now does not undo it, since however firm he may be there will still be ground for regret. Regret is the mildest of the classic's bad outcomes and it is also a lasting one, which suits this hexagram exactly.

The useful part of the reading is the commentary's observation that no one will accept him. That is not a moral verdict handed down from above. It is a description of what happens when people cannot predict somebody, and it names the practical currency the whole figure trades in. Duration is what makes a person usable to others, and a character that varies is expensive to deal with however good any single instance of it was.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Xun becomes Kan and the figure becomes Deliverance, King Wen 40, in which a tension breaks, the thunderstorm clears and what was bound is released. Read against a line about standing in the eyes of others, that destination is unexpectedly kind. The way out of an inconsistent record is a genuine release and a fresh start rather than a tighter grip on the old one, and the classic advises returning to ordinary conditions quickly once it arrives.