Grace, Line 3

The third line is the most comfortable position in Grace and the text immediately attaches a condition to it. Legge's translation shows a subject with the appearance of being adorned and bedewed with rich favours, then instructs him to maintain firm correctness continually, after which there is good fortune. Bedewed is the important word. Dew settles gently, it comes from outside, and it does not last past the morning unless something replaces it.

The structure explains where the favours come from. This firm stroke stands at the top of the lower trigram Li with a yielding line directly below it and another directly above, so it is attended on both sides at once. That is a pleasant arrangement and a slightly precarious one, since a position sustained by the goodwill of its neighbours depends on goodwill continuing. The hexagram of ornament reaches, at this line, the point where being decorated becomes agreeable enough to be dangerous.

The instruction is therefore about duration rather than conduct. Firm correctness is not offered here as a way of earning the favours, which have already arrived, but as the only thing that keeps them from becoming the whole of the position. Good fortune is granted on a continuing basis, renewed as long as the constancy is renewed, and it is withheld from anyone who mistakes the dew on the surface for something they have grown themselves.

This changing line finds a querent in circumstances that are going well, admired, supported, and comfortable, and it declines to simply congratulate them. The good fortune it names is conditional and continuous, granted only while firm correctness is maintained, which makes it less a forecast than a maintenance schedule. Readings arrive here during favourable stretches: a run of praise, a period of easy backing, a relationship in its warmest phase.

The specific hazard is softening. Attention that arrives without being asked for is pleasant, and it can quietly replace the standard a person was holding themselves to before it arrived. Because the surrounding lines supply the favour rather than the querent earning it fresh each day, the line warns that the supply is not guaranteed and that the querent's own steadiness is the only part of the arrangement they control.

Firm and correctly placed at the top of the lower trigram Li, flanked by yielding strokes on both sides, the position has real strength that is currently being cushioned. The practical counsel is to keep doing whatever produced the goodwill in the first place, and to keep doing it at the same standard now that nobody is checking. A querent who can name the discipline they held before the favours began, and confirm they are still holding it, has already satisfied what this line asks.