Great Taming, Line 5

Resistance gives way to removal at the fifth position. Legge's translation gives the teeth of a castrated hog and promises good fortune, an image whose whole force lies in what has not been done: the tusks remain, and the aggression that would have driven them has been taken away at its source. Nothing has been blocked, and yet nothing is dangerous.

This is the ruling line of the hexagram, a yielding stroke central to the upper trigram Gen though standing in an odd place, incorrect by the letter of the rule. Centrality carries it, as it does elsewhere in the book, and commentary reads the softness of the line as essential to the method rather than incidental to it. A harder approach would have had to meet the tusks directly; this one never encounters them at all.

Set beside the fourth position's horn board, the fifth marks the more sophisticated of the two restraints. The board shapes a strength that will still be there; the removal here means the strength never arrives in the form that needed shaping. Great Taming is a hexagram about holding great power in reserve, and this line supplies its most economical technique for doing so, which is why it holds the ruling place. Restraint that never has to be exercised is the highest form the hexagram recognises, and the fifth position is where it is finally described.

Go for the root. Someone drawing this changing line is being told that the trouble in front of them can be addressed at its source rather than at the point where it keeps surfacing, and that doing so will succeed where direct resistance has not. The image of a boar whose tusks remain but whose aggression has been removed describes a solution leaving the visible situation much as it was while changing what drives it entirely.

The practical difficulty is one of identification. Resisting a symptom is obvious and available; finding the cause underneath it is neither, and a reading landing here usually asks a querent to look further back than the point where the problem announces itself. The good fortune the text promises attaches to the depth of the intervention rather than to its strength.

Central to the upper trigram Gen and the ruling position of the hexagram despite standing incorrectly in an odd place, this line represents restraint at its most intelligent. What it counsels is not more force applied to a persistent difficulty but a different point of application altogether, chosen so that the difficulty stops being produced rather than merely being contained. Where such a point can be found, the line promises it will hold without further effort, which is what separates this counsel from ordinary persistence.