Small Taming, Line 2

Small Taming's second line does not correct itself on its own initiative; it is drawn back to the proper course by the companion below it, and Legge's rendering, the second nine undivided, promises good fortune for that return. The brief commentary explains that he returns by the attraction of the line beneath him, and that he is in the central place.

Nine in the second place occupies the middle of Qian, the lower trigram, and though a firm line in an even numbered position is not counted as strictly correct by the usual rule of position, the centrality of the place compensates for it here. The imagery builds directly on the first line: where line one returned on its own initiative, line two is drawn back by that same companion beneath it, so the return becomes a shared, mutually reinforcing motion rather than a solitary correction. Nothing in Small Taming has yet organized itself into active restraint at this height either, and the two lower lines of Qian effectively confirm each other in holding to their own proper conduct.

The picture Legge's commentary gives is one of companionship doing the quiet work that compulsion has not yet had to do. Being drawn back by an ally, rather than driven back by an obstacle, is itself the reason the line counts as fortunate, and it sets the pattern the rest of the lower trigram will continue before the restraining fourth line is reached.

As a changing line, nine in the second place reads as fortune that arrives through companionship rather than through solitary effort. The querent is not being asked to correct course alone; something beneath or beside them, an ally on the same path, is doing part of the work of drawing them back to it. Because the line sits central in the lower trigram, the reading carries a steadiness that the first line's more tentative return does not quite have on its own.

Flipping this line changes the lower trigram from Qian to Li, Fire, so the hexagram becomes Xun over Li, the hexagram called The Family. Small Taming's picture of one small force gently checking a greater one gives way to a hexagram built entirely around ordered relationships within a household, each member correctly placed. The movement is from an impersonal, structural restraint toward a distinctly relational one: the attraction that draws this line back to its course becomes, on the other side of change, the bonds that hold a family in its proper order.

Within the hexagram's own movement, this second position is where mutual support first appears, one line answering another rather than acting in isolation. A reading that falls here suggests that whatever correction is needed will not have to be carried alone, and that the deeper shift it points toward, from gentle restraint to ordered relationship, is already implicit in the companionship of this line.