Fellowship, Line 5

The fifth line resolves the tension the third and fourth lines built. Legge's translation shows the subject first crying out and weeping, then afterward laughing, a union delayed by great obstacles but ultimately achieved once those obstacles are overcome, adding that a great host is needed to meet the one sought, but that they do at last meet. The emotional arc compressed into this single line, distress giving way to joy, mirrors the hexagram's own arc from an open gate through rivalry and abandoned struggle to the fellowship this line finally secures.

This is the central line of the upper trigram Qian, the ruling position of the hexagram by virtue of centrality and correctness together, a yang line rightly placed at an odd position and honored as the seat from which the whole figure's authority radiates. That the ruling line should itself weep before it laughs is telling: even the most rightly placed strength in the hexagram must pass through real difficulty, the standoff of the third line, the abandoned assault of the fourth, before the fellowship the Judgment promises is actually reached.

Read within the hexagram's full sequence, the fifth line answers the second: the sole yielding line every other line sought is here finally attained by the hexagram's own ruler, but only after obstacles considerable enough to require a great host to overcome them. The tears are not weakness. They are the true cost of a union worth crying out for in the first place.

Nine in the fifth place is read as one of the more emotionally vivid lines in the entire system, and divinatory tradition treats its arc, weeping followed by laughter, as proof that a union delayed by real obstacles is not thereby a lesser union once achieved. A querent whose reading lands here should expect that whatever fellowship, partnership, or reconciliation they are seeking will demand genuine effort, possibly requiring the equivalent of a great host to overcome what stands in the way, but that the difficulty itself does not indicate failure. The laughter promised at the end of the line belongs to those who do not abandon the pursuit partway through.

As the ruling line of the hexagram, centrally and correctly placed in the upper trigram Qian, this position carries the authority every other line in Fellowship with Men is oriented toward, whether directly, as the second line is, or through the intervening contest of the third and fourth lines. A changing line here often marks the point in a longer story where a goal pursued since the hexagram's very first line, open fellowship rather than narrow or contested union, is finally within reach, though only after passing through exactly the difficulties the earlier lines already described.

Set beside the sixth line still to come, which settles for fellowship found quietly in the open country without any comparable achievement, the fifth line stands as the hexagram's high point: not the easiest union, but the fullest one, won by a ruler willing to weep before laughing rather than settle early for less.