Following, Line 6

Following ends by becoming permanent. Legge's translation of the topmost line describes sincerity firmly held and clung to, and then bound fast, and closes with the king presenting his offerings on the western mountain. The repetition in the first half is the point: held, clung to, and then tied, three degrees of attachment in a single clause, each tighter than the last. Whatever freedom of choice the first line exercised in going beyond its own gate is gone by this position.

A yielding stroke correctly occupies this even place at the top of the upper trigram Dui, past the ruling seat and at the end of the hexagram's movement. Sixth lines describe situations that have run their full course, and here the course has run into permanence. The image that follows is a royal sacrifice at a mountain in the west, an act of ritual obligation that recurs and is not renegotiated, and it supplies the register the whole line is written in.

The hexagram is not judging this state, which is why no fortune is pronounced. What it does is complete an argument. Following began as a free change of direction, passed through choices that could be reversed, was warned about ambiguity and steadied by a standard, and now hardens into a bond that is simply kept. The offering on the mountain is the picture of what attachment finally looks like when it has stopped being a decision and become a practice.

Six at the top answers a querent whose attachment is no longer in question: a vow, a long marriage, a duty of care, a commitment that has passed the stage where leaving it is one of the available options. The reading pronounces neither good fortune nor misfortune, and that neutrality is deliberate. The line is not evaluating whether the bond was well chosen. It is describing what it has become, and asking the querent to recognise the difference.

What a reading can do with this line is redirect the question. Querents at this position often arrive still asking whether to continue, and the counsel is that the useful question has changed: not whether to keep the commitment but how to keep it well, since the ritual image the text closes on is about faithful repetition rather than decision. Sustaining something indefinitely takes different resources from choosing it, and those resources are what the querent should now be attending to.

The line also carries a quiet caution against sanctifying the bond. An attachment that has become permanent can start to be defended as though it were sacred, and the querent may find themselves justifying the arrangement rather than living in it. The hexagram's ruling fifth line supplies the corrective, that what is followed should be genuinely good, and a querent here does well to keep asking that of the commitment even when leaving it is no longer on the table.