Work on the Decayed, Line 4

One place in this hexagram is where the repair does not happen, and it is the fourth. Legge's translation shows a son viewing indulgently the troubles caused by his father, and states that if he goes forward he will find cause to regret it, while the Little Symbolism adds that going forward will not succeed. Indulgence here is not kindness. It is the decision to let a known fault stand and to proceed as though the decision had no consequences, and the text closes off that route in two separate sentences.

The line is yielding in an even place and therefore correct by the standard rule, which makes its failure instructive. Correctness of position guarantees nothing about the use made of it. Sitting at the base of the upper trigram Gen, the still mountain, this line has left the active lower trigram and entered the region where the hexagram's work should be consolidated, and it consolidates nothing.

Read against the third line below, which spends too much energy and is absolved, the fourth spends none and is not. That contrast is the clearest statement of what Work on the Decayed values. The hexagram was never about avoiding the discomfort of correction. It was about whether the decay is met at all, and this line records what follows when it is politely ignored.

Six in the fourth place is drawn when a querent is being asked, in effect, whether they intend to keep tolerating something they have already recognised as wrong. The answer is unusually blunt. Advancing while the fault remains untouched leads to regret, and the accompanying commentary removes the alternative reading by saying that going forward will not succeed. Neither sentence promises disaster, and neither offers a way to proceed without dealing with the matter first.

Structurally the line is properly placed, yielding in an even position, and querents sometimes take that correctness as reassurance. It is not. The position is right and the conduct is not, which is precisely why the line is worth drawing. Yielding is the appropriate quality here only if it yields to the work rather than to the temptation to leave a difficult inheritance undisturbed.

In practice this line often marks a deferral that has already been made once and is about to be made again, in a business handed on in poor condition, a policy nobody wants to reopen, or a family arrangement everyone can see is failing. The counsel is to stop the forward motion until the correction is actually begun, because the cost named here is not the cost of acting but the cost of continuing.