The Family, Line 2

The second line describes a woman of the household providing the food and taking no initiative of her own, and says that firm correctness brings good fortune. Legge's translation places her in the central place, which is the term the classic uses for the middle line of a trigram, and the reading turns on that word rather than on the meal. The division of labour assumed here is the division of a Zhou household, and it is set down as the text has it rather than adjusted.

That framing belongs to the period the text comes from and is best read as its own, because the argument the line makes does not depend on it. What the classic asserts is that the centre of an arrangement is not where initiative is generated, and that the member holding the centre is doing something other than deciding. This stroke is yielding, correctly placed in an even seat and central in the lower trigram Li, which by the ordinary rules is the strongest combination of qualities available anywhere in the lower half of a figure.

The good fortune is made conditional on firmness, and that is where the line stops being merely descriptive. Occupying a central position without asserting anything is a virtue only if the person occupying it is unmovable in some respect, and the text names correctness as the thing that must not give way. Read against the fifth line, where the king reaches his family, the second is the household's other pole of authority, and the classic sets it the same requirement it sets the ruler.

Six in the second place is the hexagram's account of influence exercised without initiative. Its subject takes nothing upon herself, attends to the food of the household from the central position, and is firm and correct, and good fortune follows on those terms. The roles it assigns are the roles of the period the text was written in, and a present day reading has to hold two facts at once: the assignment is period-bound, and the mechanism described inside it is not.

That mechanism is worth stating plainly, because it is the transferable part. A person at the centre of an arrangement supplies what everyone in it depends on daily, and dependence of that kind is a standing that never has to be claimed. The line warns against converting it into initiative. Its whole counsel is that the position works because it is not used to push, and that the firmness required is inward, a refusal to be moved off what is correct rather than any effort to move somebody else.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Li becomes Qian and the figure becomes Small Taming, King Wen 9, in which one yielding line restrains five strong ones and the classic is explicit that the restraint is small and is nonetheless effective. The destination names the kind of power this line holds. It is not the power to direct, it is genuine, and the classic is careful in both figures to say exactly how far it reaches and where it stops.