Conflict, Line 5

The fifth line reaches the ruling position of the hexagram, and the tone shifts decisively from caution and retreat to unqualified endorsement: contending from the position of the ruler brings great good fortune, since one who judges from a rightful, central place resolves conflict fairly. This is the only line in Conflict described in such directly favorable terms, and its placement is deliberate. Everywhere else in the hexagram, contention is something to be managed, avoided, or ended early; here alone it is something exercised properly, by a party whose position itself supplies the fairness that the earlier lines had to seek through retreat or deference instead. The line reads less as permission to fight than as a description of what makes any judgment legitimate: not personal stake in the outcome, but standing central and impartial enough that the resolution serves the dispute rather than one side of it.

Read against the hexagram's repeated warning against forcing conflict to its bitter end, line five is the exception that proves the rule, since a ruler judging from genuine impartiality is not forcing an outcome at all, only recognizing one. Later readers of the hexagram treat this line as the standard against which the other five are measured, the single point in Conflict where contention and fairness are shown to be fully compatible rather than opposed to one another.

Rightful judgment is what this line describes, and Conflict grants it great good fortune rather than the qualified or cautionary reading every other line receives. It is the only station in the hexagram where a yang stroke sits correctly placed in an odd position at the center of the upper trigram, firmness and centrality together, the single most favored configuration the classical system recognizes. When this line changes, the central stroke of Qian becomes yielding, turning the upper trigram into Li, fire and clarity, while the lower trigram Kan remains fixed below.

The resulting hexagram is Number 64, Before Completion, fire over water, the final hexagram of the entire sequence of sixty four, an image of a situation nearly but not yet resolved, every line out of its usual correct place, poised on the edge of order without having fully arrived at it. That the one moment of clean, rightful judgment in Conflict should transform into the hexagram of things almost, but not quite, settled is a fitting closing note: even the fairest resolution of a dispute does not erase every consequence of it, and what follows a just judgment is still a situation requiring further, careful completion. That the full sequence of sixty four hexagrams itself ends on Before Completion is worth noting, since it places the one moment of rightful judgment in Conflict a single change away from the final figure in the entire system.