Duration, Line 6

At the summit the hexagram turns on itself. Legge's translation shows the subject exciting himself to long continuance and gives evil, while the commentary adds that far will he be from achieving merit. Every line below has been about steadiness of one kind or another, and the figure closes with somebody working hard at being steady, which the text treats as a contradiction rather than as an excess of a good thing.

The distinction is between a state and a performance of it. Duration in this classic is a course renewed quietly inside a fixed form, and the Image counsels the superior person to stand firm and not to change their method. Agitation directed at that end destroys the end, because calm was what had been asked for and effort spent producing calm is not calm. A person visibly straining to be constant has already stopped being constant.

The stroke is yielding in an even seat, correct by the ordinary rule, at the top of the upper trigram Zhen. Zhen is thunder, whose attribute is arousing movement, and a line at the extremity of that trigram is movement at its furthest reach. In a figure that pairs thunder with wind precisely so that motion and penetration temper one another, the topmost line is where the motion has run past its partner and is shaking on its own.

Six at the top warns a querent against the very effort they are making to hold something together. The text is unambiguous that this is a misfortune and the commentary adds that merit is nowhere in reach, which for a closing line is a bleak pair of verdicts. Nothing external has gone wrong. What has gone wrong is that constancy has become a project, pursued with agitation, and the pursuit is consuming the thing it was meant to preserve.

This is a common shape in practice and a hard one to see from inside. Somebody keeps checking a commitment, keeps restating it, keeps taking measures to secure it, and the activity itself communicates that it is not secure. The hexagram's counsel throughout has been to stand firm without changing method, and restlessness of this kind is a change of method carried out in the name of not changing anything.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Zhen becomes Li and the figure becomes The Cauldron, King Wen 50, the vessel in which raw material is transformed and offered, standing firm on its legs and holding whatever is put into it. The destination is the right answer to an agitated summit. What holds does so by being a container rather than by being gripped, and the classic points a restless line toward the one image in the set defined entirely by standing still and being useful.