Keeping Still, Line 5

The fifth line of Keeping Still (King Wen 52) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as keeping the jawbones still, so that words are always well ordered, occasion for repentance disappears. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns resting like the back, so one loses all consciousness of self, walking in one's own courtyard and not seeing the persons in it, no error, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the middle place of the upper trigram Gen, mountain in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Gen, mountain in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads mountains standing one over another; the superior man does not let his thoughts go beyond his own position, and the fifth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Gen below and Gen above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Gen is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Keeping the Jawbones Still, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.

As a divinatory line, six at the fifth place of Keeping Still reads within the hexagram's overall concern with resting like the back, so one loses all consciousness of self, walking in one's own courtyard and not seeing the persons in it, no error. The line occupies a place that does not match its own nature in the classical doctrine that odd places favour a firm, yang line and even places favour a yielding, yin line. It is also one of the two central lines of the hexagram, the place classical reading treats as the most balanced regardless of the line's own character. Its own text, that keeping the jawbones still, so that words are always well ordered, occasion for repentance disappears, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The fifth line corresponds by classical convention with the second line, and the two do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Gen in the upper position of the figure, the line marks the ruling stage of the hexagram, the place classical reading treats as its centre of authority, one stage in the six stage movement the hexagram traces from its first line to its last.

A change at this line, from yin to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the fifth line of Keeping Still turns Gen into Xun while the other trigram, Gen, stays as it is, which yields Keeping Still's changing partner, Development (King Wen 53), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.