Great Preponderance, Line 2

The second line supplies the hexagram's first image of renewal. Legge's translation describes a decayed willow that puts out shoots, and pairs it with a household example, an old husband who has a young wife, with advantage in every way. The botanical half of the image carries the structural reasoning. Shoots on a willow break from low on the trunk or from the root, so the new growth comes from beneath the old wood rather than from its crown, and that is precisely the relation this line has to the yielding stroke below it.

Strong and central in the lower trigram Xun, this stroke stands in an even place, which the ordinary rule counts as incorrect. In this hexagram the mismatch works in its favour. A time of excess is one in which strength has piled up in the middle while the ends have gone weak, and a strong line that turns downward to the weak line beneath it is drawing on the one thing the middle of the figure lacks. What the text approves is the direction of the attachment.

The household comparison is the Zhou text speaking in the terms of its own period, and its verdict rests on that period's assumptions about marriage, age and the bearing of heirs rather than on anything a modern reader would supply. Set down plainly, the text ranks this pairing as advantageous where it will rank the mirrored pairing at the fifth line as merely blameless. The willow explains the difference in terms the marriage framing does not: growth that starts at the root can become a tree.

Nine in the second place is a favourable line, and what it favours is an unequal attachment that draws on something below rather than above. A querent here is typically strong in the matter at hand and short of whatever grounds it, and the line indicates that a connection with a weaker, earlier or less established party will supply what strength alone has not. The decayed willow putting out shoots is the operative picture: new growth appearing low down on old wood, which is where willow shoots actually come from.

The reading should not be split off from the text's own comparison, an old husband taking a young wife, called advantageous in every way. That valuation belongs to the Zhou period, framed by a society that measured a union by the heirs it might produce and applied different standards to the ages of the two parties, and it is reported here as it stands rather than tidied. What carries over into any other setting is the structural point the willow makes on its own. This line reaches downward, and downward is where a root can form.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Xun becomes Gen and the figure becomes Influence, King Wen 31, the hexagram of mutual attraction between two parties who genuinely answer one another. The movement confirms the reading. An attachment that begins with one party supplying what the other lacks is on its way to becoming reciprocal, which the fifth line's mirrored image never manages.