Opposition, Line 2

The second line arranges nothing and succeeds anyway. Legge's translation has its subject happening to meet his lord in a bye-passage, and gives no error. The event is accidental in form: not an audience, not a petition, not a formal approach through the proper channel, but an encounter in a side lane that could not have been scheduled and would have been improper to arrange even if it could.

The classic calls it no error rather than good fortune, and the distinction carries the reading. In a time of estrangement the correct channels are precisely the ones that have stopped working, and somebody who insists on using them will reach nobody at all. Meeting in a lane is irregular and the text absolves it, which is a different thing from recommending irregularity as a method. What is permitted is the taking of an opening that has presented itself.

Structurally this is a strong stroke, central in the lower trigram Dui but incorrectly placed in an even seat, and it corresponds to the yielding fifth line at the ruling place of the upper trigram. That correspondence is the lord of the line, and it is one of only two proper correlations the whole hexagram contains. In a figure where nearly every line is out of position, two strokes that answer each other across the divide are worth far more than the irregularity of where they happen to meet.

Nine in the second place is the practical instruction of the hexagram, and it concerns accepting an irregular opening. The subject meets his lord in a side lane and there is no error in it. A querent drawing this line usually needs to reach somebody who has become unreachable by the ordinary route, and the counsel is that the meeting will happen sideways or not at all, and that taking it sideways carries no fault.

What the line rules out is the manufactured version. An encounter engineered to look accidental is a formal approach wearing a disguise, and the text describes something genuinely unplanned. The counsel is therefore about readiness rather than about strategy. A person who has kept themselves available, and has not spent the estrangement assembling a case against the other party, is the one who can use the lane when the lane appears.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Dui becomes Zhen and the figure becomes Biting Through, King Wen 21, in which an obstruction lodged between the jaws is bitten through and the figure is read as the clearing of what stands in the way. That is a forceful destination for an accidental meeting, and it is sharpened by the fifth line of this same hexagram, the lord this line has just met, whose own image is of uniting as readily as biting through skin.