Nourishment, Line 2

The second line of Nourishment is refused twice over. Legge's translation reads it as looking downward for nourishment, which is contrary to what is proper, and then as turning to the mound on high, with evil following if the subject goes forward on that footing. The commentary on the image says that the subject acts contrary to his proper class, and the phrase is the key to the whole line. The fault is not the seeking but the direction of it, first below where a superior should not beg, then above where this line has nobody answering.

Structurally the stroke is yielding in an even place, correct by the ordinary rule, and central in the lower trigram Zhen. Almost anywhere else that combination would earn approval. Here it does not, because a hexagram about nourishment measures a line by its relationships rather than by its placement alone, and this line has none it can properly draw on. The fifth place above it is yielding too, so no correspondence exists to feed it, while the strong first line beneath belongs to a station it ought not to be soliciting.

Read within the mouth the whole figure draws, this is the position of a jaw that opens in every direction and closes on nothing. The line is not condemned for hunger, which the hexagram treats as ordinary and unremarkable, but for a hunger that will take support from anywhere and therefore secures none. Its misfortune follows from movement without a proper object, which is what the trigram Zhen, thunder and arousal, produces when it has nowhere correct to go.

As a changing line, six in the second place counsels a querent against soliciting support from a quarter that has no proper obligation to supply it. The two rejected directions, downward to a station beneath the querent's own and upward to a height with no answering connection, describe the same error twice over: an approach made because help is imagined to be there, not because any real relationship makes it available. The text's word for the result is misfortune, and its explanation is that the subject acts contrary to his proper class.

What makes this reading uncomfortable is that nothing about the querent's own position is wrong. The stroke is yielding in an even place and central in its trigram, which by the standard rule is correctness itself. The difficulty is relational. The fifth line, which would ordinarily answer the second, is yielding as well, so there is no complement to draw on, and a request sent upward finds nobody obliged to receive it. A reading landing here often marks a person entirely justified in needing help and entirely mistaken about where to ask for it.

The changing line turns the lower trigram Zhen into Dui and produces Decrease, King Wen 41. That figure names the outcome without softening it. What follows an approach made in the wrong direction is not the support that was sought but a reduction in what the querent already had. The instruction is to establish a genuine correspondence first, and to leave the approach unmade until one exists.