Duration, Line 4

The fourth line is a handful of words in translation and needs no more. Legge's rendering gives a field where there is no game, and the commentary on the image asks the obvious question: going for long to what is not his proper place, how can he get game? Nothing in the line is done badly. The hunting is diligent and may well be expert, and the field is empty, so the whole of the effort produces nothing at all.

The image is the hexagram's sharpest correction to a lazy reading of itself. Duration is easily mistaken for persistence and the text is careful to separate them. A person continuing steadily in a place that has nothing in it satisfies every requirement of endurance and none of the requirement in the judgement, which is that it furthers one to have somewhere to go. Lasting is a direction held over time, and a direction pointing nowhere does not become fruitful by being held longer.

The stroke is strong in an even seat, incorrect by the ordinary rule, at the base of the upper trigram Zhen. The commentary says outright that the place is not the subject's proper one, so the structural fault and the image are one fact stated twice. Force is present and correctly applied within itself, and it is standing where there was never anything to be got.

Nine in the fourth place tells a querent to check the ground rather than the effort. The reading concerns work being done properly in a place that cannot repay it, and the classic's image for that is a hunter in an empty field. Nothing about the person's diligence is in question, which is what makes the line hard to hear. The problem is location, and no quantity of additional persistence changes a location.

In practice this covers a role that has stopped containing anything, a relationship kept up in a form that no longer holds either party, or a line of work continued because it was once productive. The commentary sharpens it by adding the word long: it is not merely being in the wrong place, it is going there for a long time. In a hexagram that praises constancy, that is the one form constancy can take which produces nothing whatever.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Zhen becomes Kun and the figure becomes Pushing Upward, King Wen 46, in which wood grows out of the earth by degrees and the counsel is to advance and to seek out the person who can help. The destination names the remedy exactly. What replaces hunting an empty field is a slow accumulation somewhere that will actually feed it, and the movement recommended is upward and toward other people rather than sideways.