Retreat, Line 1

A retreat is described here from the rear, and the rear is where it goes wrong. Legge's translation puts the subject at the retiring tail, calls the position perilous, and directs that no movement in any direction be made, while the commentary on the image adds that by not moving, calamity is avoided. The figure is the sky above a mountain, height withdrawing from height, and the counsel of the hexagram as a whole is a withdrawal made in good order. This line is the part of that withdrawal which has not yet begun to move and is already exposed.

Position accounts for the severity. The stroke is yielding in an odd place, incorrect by the ordinary rule, and it stands at the very bottom of the lower trigram Gen, the mountain, whose nature is to stop. Gen is two yielding lines under one firm one, so the strong stroke that gives the trigram its stillness lies two places above this one. The line has neither the strength to move well nor the elevation to be out of reach, which is exactly the condition of a rearguard.

What the text prescribes is stillness rather than speed, and the distinction carries the line. A tail that thrashes draws pursuit onto the whole body. The Great Symbolism reads the figure as the superior man holding small men at a distance by dignified gravity rather than by any show of dislike, and at this station the gravity is all there is: no ground has been put between the subject and the difficulty, and the only correct action available is to make no movement at all.

Six at the beginning warns a querent against being the last one out. The reading concerns a withdrawal already under way in which this person occupies the exposed rear, and the instruction is unusually absolute: undertake nothing, in any direction. The commentary on the image supplies the reason, which is that calamity is avoided by not moving rather than by moving well. Somebody drawing this line is not being told to withdraw better. They are being told that withdrawal is not yet available to them.

The position explains why. A yielding stroke in an odd place has no resource of its own, and it sits at the floor of the mountain trigram Gen, whose whole character is stopping. A querent here usually knows the situation is ending and wants to be seen managing the ending gracefully. That wish is the hazard the text names, because a visible movement at the rear identifies the retreat to whatever it is retreating from, and this line has nothing in hand with which to survive being identified.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Gen becomes Li and the figure becomes Fellowship, King Wen 13, in which people out in the open hold together by a common bond. Read from the tail of a retreat, that destination reframes the counsel entirely. What ends the exposure is not distance and not concealment but company, and the stillness this line demands is what lasts long enough for the others to be reached.