Abiding Long in the Due Mean, and the Reading That Needs No Action

Nine in the second place asks a querent to keep doing what they are already doing. The whole of the text is that occasion for repentance disappears, and the commentary attributes that to the capacity to abide long in the due mean. Nothing is promised beyond the removal of a regret, and for a reading that is often the most valuable outcome available, because a great many difficulties resolve by being outlasted rather than by being solved.

The counsel is therefore against intervention. A person holding a middle position steadily is in the one situation this hexagram approves of without qualification, and the temptation the line addresses is the belief that a problem must have an action taken against it. Here the action is the waiting, and the fault the querent expected to answer for is being dissolved by time and position rather than by effort.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Xun becomes Gen and the figure becomes Small Preponderance, King Wen 62, where small things may be done and great ones may not. That destination reads as a boundary rather than a reversal. The steadiness which dissolves a regret is not a mandate for anything larger, and a querent who takes the second line's ease as permission to attempt something ambitious ends up in the figure that counsels the bird to fly low.