Darkening of the Light, Line 5

The fifth line is the only one in the hexagram that names a person. Legge's translation gives the darkening of the light of the count of Ji, and adds that it will be advantageous to be firm and correct. The count is remembered as a man who kept his integrity under a ruler he could not correct, by putting his own intelligence out of sight, and the classic treats that concealment not as a compromise but as the course the position required.

That position belongs to the period the text comes from and should be read as such rather than quietly generalised. The alternative to concealment at such a court was not disagreement but destruction, and the line is composed for a reader who takes that as given. What survives the change of setting is the structural claim underneath it: the text separates what a person is from what a person is seen to be, and puts correctness entirely in the first. Firmness here is invisible by design, and the line says so without treating the invisibility as a loss.

Structurally this is a yielding stroke in an odd place, incorrect by the ordinary rule, yet central in the upper trigram Kun and immediately below the topmost line where the classic puts the dark ruler. Nothing about the position is comfortable and its nearness to the top is the danger in it. Being central is what allows the line to hold anything at all, and being incorrectly placed is why what it holds cannot be shown to anybody.

Six in the fifth place is the hexagram's advice to somebody with no exit. The line names the count of Ji, whose brightness was darkened, and says that firmness and correctness are what serve. Where the first line flew and the fourth walked out through the gate and courtyard, this one stays, and what it offers is the maintenance of an inner standard in a place where showing that standard would finish the person holding it.

The framing belongs to its period and is given here as it stands, a court in which a man of rank concealed what he knew because the ruler above him would not tolerate it being known. The transferable content is the discipline rather than the setting. A querent here is being told that the situation cannot be corrected from where they stand, that departure is not currently available to them, and that what remains under their control is whether the compromise reaches the part of them that was worth protecting in the first place.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Kun becomes Kan and the figure becomes After Completion, King Wen 63, every line correctly placed and the classic warning immediately that such an arrangement decays. The destination is honest about what concealment achieves. It holds a thing in order at real cost, and it is a station rather than a resolution, which is why the line asks for firmness sustained over time and promises no end to the conditions requiring it.