Retreat, Line 6

The topmost line completes the figure without difficulty, which is rare in the classic. Legge's translation shows the subject retiring in a noble way and calls it advantageous in every respect, while the commentary on the image adds that there is no doubt about the course to be taken. Elsewhere the sixth place is the station of excess, where a good thing is carried past its limit and turns into its opposite. In Retreat it is the one place where the movement of the hexagram and the movement of the line agree.

The reason is that this figure is about going, and the top line is furthest gone. A strong stroke at the extremity of the upper trigram Qian has the whole distance behind it and nothing above it left to be caught by. The first line was a tail with no ground gained and no room to move; this is the same withdrawal seen from the far end, with everything that made it perilous down there converted into space up here.

The absence of doubt is the substance of the line rather than a flourish on it. Every other place in the hexagram is deciding something under pressure: whether to move, what to keep, who is holding one back, whether one is willing. At this station those questions are settled by the fact of having already gone, and the nobility the text credits is not a manner adopted for the occasion but the shape a withdrawal takes when nothing has been left undone behind it.

Nine at the top is the cleanest reading in Retreat and its counsel is simply to finish. The line describes a withdrawal made in a noble way, advantageous in every respect, with the commentary noting that no doubt attends the course. A querent drawing it has usually already done the hard part and is looking for confirmation, and the confirmation arrives without the hedging that qualifies almost every other favourable line in the classic.

The position accounts for that. A strong stroke at the top of Qian stands at the greatest possible distance from the mountain below, past every entanglement the lower lines described, and the sixth place, which usually indicates having gone too far, means here only having gone far enough. Somebody in this position can afford generosity toward what they are leaving, and generosity at the point of departure is most of what the word noble is doing in the line.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Qian becomes Dui and the figure becomes Influence, King Wen 31, the mutual attraction of two parties who move toward one another. Read from the far end of a retreat that is a surprising destination and a fitting one. A departure completed without residue leaves the person free to be drawn toward something new, which is not available to anyone still arguing with what they left.