Enthusiasm, Line 3

Two regrets are named in the third line and they are not the same regret. Legge's translation shows its subject looking upward while indulging the feeling of pleasure and satisfaction, and warns that there will be occasion for repentance, with more of it if the change comes late. The first regret belongs to the posture itself, a person whose enthusiasm is entirely directed at someone above them. The second belongs to how long they keep it up after seeing what it is.

The stroke is yielding in an odd place, incorrectly positioned, at the top of the lower trigram Kun and pressed directly against the hexagram's single strong line above it. Proximity is the trouble. This line is close enough to the source of the figure's energy to warm itself there permanently, and near enough to mistake that warmth for its own. Nothing in the position generates anything, and the upward gaze is a description of that emptiness rather than a moral judgement on it.

What separates this line from ordinary flattery is the second clause, which treats the situation as still recoverable. Regret is certain, but its size is not fixed, and the text makes it a direct function of delay. Enthusiasm borrowed from above can be set down, and the earlier it is set down the less it costs. The line is unusual in the hexagram for saying plainly that the fault has already been committed and that the only remaining question is how quickly it stops.

Six in the third place answers a querent whose situation depends on the attention of a particular person above them: a manager, a patron, a partner, a figure whose favour has become the axis of their outlook. The reading is unfavourable and it is also urgent, because the amount of regret the line predicts is explicitly tied to how long the arrangement is allowed to continue rather than to the arrangement itself.

Structurally the querent is sitting directly beneath the only source of energy in the figure, which is why the situation is comfortable enough to persist in. A reading landing here often finds someone who is not unhappy. The line's point is that the comfort is borrowed and reversible, that nothing is being built which would survive a change in the other person's interest, and that the querent already half knows this. What is being asked for is not insight but movement.

The advice is to begin generating something of one's own, immediately and at whatever small scale is available, rather than waiting for the relationship to resolve or the favour to be formalised. The text offers no version of this line in which no regret occurs, so a querent should not read the counsel as a way of avoiding cost. It is a way of limiting it. Acting now produces a manageable regret; waiting for the situation to declare itself produces the larger one the line names second.