Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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A Field Where There Is No Game

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A Field Where There Is No Game

The fourth line is a handful of words in translation and needs no more. Legge's rendering gives a field where there is no game, and the commentary on the image asks the obvious question: going for long to what is not his proper place, how can he get game? Nothing in the line is done badly. The hunting is diligent and may well be expert, and the field is empty, so the whole of the effort produces nothing at all.

The image is the hexagram's sharpest correction to a lazy reading of itself. Duration is easily mistaken for persistence and the text is careful to separate them. A person continuing steadily in a place that has nothing in it satisfies every requirement of endurance and none of the requirement in the judgement, which is that it furthers one to have somewhere to go. Lasting is a direction held over time, and a direction pointing nowhere does not become fruitful by being held longer.

The stroke is strong in an even seat, incorrect by the ordinary rule, at the base of the upper trigram Zhen. The commentary says outright that the place is not the subject's proper one, so the structural fault and the image are one fact stated twice. Force is present and correctly applied within itself, and it is standing where there was never anything to be got.

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