Duration, Line 5

The fifth line is the hexagram's most direct statement and it arrives framed in the household terms of its own period. Legge's translation has the subject continuously maintaining the virtue in question, then splits the outcome by role: in a wife this will be fortunate, in a husband it will be evil. The commentary on the image is more explicit still. The wife's part is to follow with an unchanged mind to the end of her life, while the husband must decide what is right and lay down the rule accordingly, and for him to follow as a wife does is evil.

That division of roles belongs to the society the text was composed in and to the commentarial tradition that grew up around it, and it is set down here as the text has it rather than paraphrased away. What the line is doing underneath the framing is distinguishing two different modes of constancy, and the distinction survives the framing entirely. One mode keeps faith with a course already settled. The other has to keep determining what the course is, and holding rigidly to a fixed answer is a failure of the second mode rather than a success of it.

The stroke is yielding in an odd place, incorrect by the ordinary rule, at the ruling seat of the upper trigram Zhen. Softness in the seat that must judge is the structural version of the same point. A ruler exercising only the constancy of holding on occupies a position whose duty is to determine, and the text names that mismatch by its outcome rather than by any description of it.

Six in the fifth place asks a querent which kind of steadfastness their position actually requires, and that question is worth separating from the terms the text puts it in. As Legge renders it the line makes constancy fortunate for a wife and evil for a husband, and the commentary explains the split by saying that the one follows with an unchanged mind while the other must decide what is right. Those roles are the household of the text's own period as the text and its commentary understood it. Reading past them is not permitted, and reading only them misses what the line is for.

The content that is not the framing is a real and usable distinction. Some seats are held by keeping faith with a course that has already been set, and constancy there is the whole of the virtue. Other seats exist in order to determine the course, and in those the same unchanging adherence becomes an abdication, because a duty to judge cannot be discharged once and then merely maintained. The classic attaches an outcome to each, and the two outcomes are opposite.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Zhen becomes Dui and the figure becomes Great Preponderance, King Wen 28, a ridgepole sagging under a weight too great for what carries it. The destination reads as the cost of the mismatch. A position that requires judgement and receives only adherence is loaded past its bearing points, and the beam gives way in the middle, where the decisions should have been made.