The Family, Line 3

The third line sets two failures side by side and prefers one of them. Legge's translation shows the members of the family treated with stern severity, and gives occasion for repentance, peril and good fortune together; then it describes a household where wife and children are smirking and chattering, and gives regret at the end of it. The classic is not recommending harshness. It is comparing harshness with indulgence and saying which of the two a household can be brought back from.

The stroke is strong and correctly placed at the top of the lower trigram Li, past the centre and therefore past moderation, which is exactly where a figure about order would site excessive strictness. The position produces the fault and the classic records the fault honestly: there is cause for repentance and there is danger in it. What it declines to do is treat those as decisive, because a household governed too hard still has a shape, and a shape is something that can be corrected.

The second half is where the real verdict lands. Smirking and chattering are given no danger, no cause for repentance and no peril at all, and they end in shame regardless. The line is built so that the softer failure carries the worse outcome and the reader has to notice it happening, which is a more demanding piece of construction than a straightforward warning against laxity would have been, and a more useful one.

Nine in the third place asks a querent to choose between two errors and then tells them which one to make. Stern severity in the household brings regret and danger and, in the end, good fortune; laxity that leaves wife and children to please themselves brings no danger whatever and ends in shame. The household in view is the household of the text's own period, and the comparison the line draws does not depend on that setting.

Read practically, this is a line for somebody who has been too hard on the people around them and knows it. The classic grants the fault, grants the peril in it, and does not withdraw the good fortune, which is an unusual combination and the whole point of the line. What it will not allow is the correction that overshoots. A person who answers excessive strictness by abandoning standards altogether has moved out of the half of the line that recovers and into the half that does not.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Li becomes Zhen and the figure becomes Increase, King Wen 42, in which what is above is diminished in order to add to what is below. That is the correction the line is looking for, and it is not the same thing as relaxation. Severity gives way to a deliberate transfer downward, something the person at the top surrenders so that the people beneath them gain, and the distance between that and simply letting go is the distance between the two halves of this line.