The Gentle, Line 5

The fifth line of The Gentle (King Wen 57) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as firm correctness, good fortune, all occasion for repentance disappearing, nothing that is not advantageous, no good beginning but a good ending, three days before a change of method and three days after. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns some small attainment and progress, advantage in having somewhere to go, advantage in seeing the great man, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the middle place of the upper trigram Xun, wind in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Xun, wind in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads winds following one on another; the superior man reiterates his orders and carries his affairs into effect, and the fifth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Xun above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Xun is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Firm Correctness, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.

As a divinatory line, nine at the fifth place of The Gentle reads within the hexagram's overall concern with some small attainment and progress, advantage in having somewhere to go, advantage in seeing the great man. The line occupies a place proper to its own nature in the classical doctrine that odd places favour a firm, yang line and even places favour a yielding, yin line. It is also one of the two central lines of the hexagram, the place classical reading treats as the most balanced regardless of the line's own character. Its own text, that firm correctness, good fortune, all occasion for repentance disappearing, nothing that is not advantageous, no good beginning but a good ending, three days before a change of method and three days after, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The fifth line corresponds by classical convention with the second line, and the two do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Xun in the upper position of the figure, the line marks the ruling stage of the hexagram, the place classical reading treats as its centre of authority, one stage in the six stage movement the hexagram traces from its first line to its last.

A change at this line, from yang to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the fifth line of The Gentle turns Xun into Gen while the other trigram, Xun, stays as it is, which yields The Gentle's changing partner, Work on the Decayed (King Wen 18), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.