Great Power, Line 3

The third line is where Great Power meets the thing that stops it. Legge's translation contrasts a small man who uses all his strength with a superior man whose rule is not to, calls the position perilous even under firm correctness, and supplies the image the hexagram is remembered for: a ram butting against a fence and getting its horns entangled. The animal is not defeated. It is stuck, by the same horns that made the charge possible.

Small man and superior man are the classic's own pair, a judgement of character stated in the social vocabulary of the period, and they are given here as the text gives them. What the contrast is being used to establish is not who a person is but what they do with a full measure of strength. The small man in the line is defined by the spending of it, and the superior man by holding a rule against spending it, so the whole distinction turns on conduct rather than on standing.

The stroke is strong in an odd place, correct by the ordinary rule, and it stands at the top of the lower trigram Qian directly beneath the thunder trigram Zhen. That is three firm lines stacked with more force immediately above, and it marks the point where the accumulated power of the lower trigram runs into something. Correctness of position is exactly what makes the line dangerous, because a line entitled to act is the one most likely to.

Nine in the third place asks a querent to hold something back, and it says what happens when they do not. The ram charges the fence and its horns are caught, so the strength that broke the ground is now the reason nothing moves. The text calls persistence dangerous even where the person is in the right, which is the specific case this line addresses: not power misused, but power fully used by somebody entitled to use it.

The distinction the classic draws is between a small man who spends all of his strength and a superior man who keeps a rule against doing so. That is the period's own way of sorting people and it stands here as the text has it. Underneath the vocabulary the counsel is exact and portable. A reserve is not kept out of timidity; it is the thing that lets a person disengage, and the ram in the fence has nothing left to pull with because everything went into the charge.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Qian becomes Dui and the figure becomes The Marrying Maiden, King Wen 54, an entry into a relationship on terms the one entering does not set. That is the shape of being stuck, read forward. Horns caught in a fence describe a position from which the next arrangement gets negotiated from weakness, and the line is asking the querent to notice that before the charge rather than afterwards.