Nourishment, Line 5

The fifth line holds the ruling place of Nourishment, and it holds it as a yielding stroke. Legge's translation describes a subject who departs from the ordinary course, abides in firmness, and finds good fortune, while adding that the great stream should not be crossed. Those two halves are one judgement rather than two. The line can nourish and it cannot venture, and what secures its good fortune is accepting both facts rather than acting on only the first of them.

By the ordinary rule a yielding line in this odd place is incorrect, and the departure from the regular course that the text acknowledges is exactly that: the ruler of a hexagram about feeding others is not strong enough to feed them from his own resources. What makes the position workable is the strong sixth line immediately above, which the hexagram treats as the origin of nourishment. The fifth line's role is to hold steady and stay in correspondence with that source, distributing rather than generating, and the insistence on firmness is the whole of what is asked.

The great stream is the classical image for a large undertaking with real risk and no way back once begun. Withholding it here is not timidity but accurate self assessment. A ruler who provides for others by drawing on a source above him can do that indefinitely, and cannot lead an expedition, and the good fortune the line promises depends on knowing which of the two he is being asked for.

Six in the fifth place gives a querent a favourable reading with one firm boundary drawn through it. The line promises good fortune to whoever holds steadily to a regular, unspectacular course, and in the same breath states that the great stream is not to be crossed. Read divinatorially, this describes a position entirely sound for sustaining other people and entirely unsuited to a large venture undertaken on its own strength, and the promise holds only while the distinction is respected.

The structure explains the limit. A yielding stroke occupies an odd place, which the standard rule counts as incorrect, and this position is the seat of authority in the hexagram. Whatever the querent is providing therefore comes through them rather than from them, drawn from the strong line above, which the figure names as the source. That arrangement is stable and can continue indefinitely. It cannot absorb the shock of an undertaking that puts everything at risk at once, because the resources are not the querent's to gamble.

A reading landing here often concerns somebody carrying real responsibility for other people on borrowed or shared means. The counsel is neither to resign the responsibility nor to expand it into something the means will not bear. When the line changes, the upper trigram Gen becomes Xun and the figure becomes Increase, King Wen 42, growth that arrives by giving to those below. The gain, in other words, comes from continuing to provide rather than from crossing the river.