The Clinging, Line 5

The fifth line is the hexagram's ruler and it is found weeping. Legge's translation shows the subject with tears flowing in torrents and groaning in sorrow, and then gives good fortune, which reads as a contradiction until the position is taken into account. The commentary attributes the fortune to the line occupying the place of a king or prince, so the grief is not incidental to the good outcome. It is what a person in that seat does when the situation deserves it.

The stroke is yielding in an odd place, incorrect by the ordinary rule, and it holds the centre of the upper trigram Li. Softness in the ruling seat of a figure about dependent light is not the weakness the ordinary rule would suggest. The middle line of Li is the yielding one, held between two firm strokes, and a ruler who is that line is a ruler whose clarity comes from what he is attached to rather than from any hardness of his own.

Read against its neighbours the line answers both of them. The fourth burned out on arrival and was thrown away; the sixth will go out on campaign and come back commended. Between the two stands a ruler with clarity enough to see the whole of what is happening and no defence at all against feeling it, and the classic treats that as the fortunate condition rather than as a lapse of composure.

Six in the fifth place tells a querent that the sorrow they are in is doing the work. The text is unusually direct: floods of tears, sorrowful lamentation, and then good fortune, with the commentary locating the reason in the dignity of the position rather than in any relief of the circumstances. Nothing here promises that the cause of the grief will be removed. It promises that grieving properly is the correct conduct in this place and that the outcome follows from it.

That is a hard reading to accept for anyone hoping to be told the trouble is over, and it is among the most useful in the classic for exactly that reason. A person of standing who suppresses what a situation actually costs is exercising the fourth line's kind of brightness, all flare and no attachment. The fifth line's clarity is the sort that admits the loss, and the hexagram's whole teaching is that light with nothing real to cling to does not last.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Li becomes Qian and the figure becomes Fellowship, King Wen 13, people in the open acting in common. The movement gives the counsel its practical shape. Grief acknowledged at the top of a situation is what allows others to gather rather than to scatter, and a ruler who has wept in front of the matter is the one the rest can keep company with.