Darkening of the Light, Line 2

The second line takes an injury and survives it by moving fast. Legge's translation shows the subject of the darkening wounded in the left thigh, saving himself by the strength of a horse, and calls the outcome fortunate. The wound is specific and it is specifically not fatal. A thigh is what a person walks on, so the damage is to movement rather than to life, and the remedy the line names is a better means of movement applied at once.

This is the yielding stroke that sits in the middle of the lower trigram Li and gives that trigram its whole character. Held between two strong lines, central and correctly placed in an even seat, it can be hurt without being lost. In a hexagram where the light is under the earth, the second line is the point at which brightness is still properly itself, and the injury it takes is the tax on being visible at all in such a time.

The horse is the classic being practical. Speed is not a virtue here and it is not a strategy; it is a resource that happens to be available, and it is used before the wound has time to settle. Good fortune arrives without qualification, which is rare in this figure, and the reason is that the line does not argue with what has happened to it. It registers the damage, applies what it has to hand, and gets clear of the place where more damage is waiting.

The wound and the horse make this the most workable line in the hexagram, and its counsel is speed rather than courage. A querent drawing it has taken, or is about to take, a real injury from a situation that has turned against clear sight. The line says the injury is to capacity rather than to survival, and that it should be answered immediately with whatever carries weight and moves quickly. Good fortune here is contingent on the answer being fast.

What the line refuses is deliberation. There is no counsel to determine who did the wounding, no instruction to be firm and correct while enduring it, and no suggestion that a darkening can be reasoned with. The strength of a horse is borrowed strength rather than the subject's own, and a reading landing here usually concerns help that already exists and has not yet been called on.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Li becomes Qian and the figure becomes Peace, King Wen 11, earth above and heaven below, the figure in which the heavy sits over the rising and the two therefore meet. That is a startling destination for a wounded line, and it is the strongest argument the classic makes anywhere for acting at once. A darkening answered quickly at its second stage does not merely fail to worsen. It turns into the figure of things communicating freely, because nothing in it has hardened yet.