Great Preponderance, Line 6

The topmost line ends the hexagram in the water. Legge's translation describes wading through a stream until the water passes over the head, gives evil, and then adds that there is no ground for blame. Those two statements are not in tension. The outcome is bad and the conduct is not faulted, a distinction the text is willing to draw and most readers are not. In a hexagram about weight carried past what a structure can bear, this is the moment the crossing is attempted regardless.

The stroke is yielding in an even place at the top of the upper trigram Dui, correct by the ordinary rule, and it is the second of the two soft ends that give the ridgepole its weakness. The Great Symbolism reads the figure as a marsh risen over the trees standing in it, and the topmost line is where a reader is put under that water rather than left looking at it. The same Symbolism describes standing alone without fear and withdrawing from the world without regret, and this is the line where the first of those has consequences.

What the text withholds is condemnation, not the loss. Somebody who wades in knowing the depth, because whatever waits on the far bank is worth it, is not being called foolish. Great Preponderance opened with mats laid under a heavy load and closes with a person out of their depth, and the two lines together mark the range the hexagram covers: what careful preparation can hold, and what it cannot.

Six at the top is read as a situation in which the cost has already been accepted. The image of wading on until the water closes over the head tells a querent that the course they are considering, or are already committed to, will not be survived intact, and the refusal to attach blame tells them it may be worth doing anyway. Very few lines make that separation as cleanly. The outcome is called evil and the conduct is called faultless in the same breath.

The position is the outer edge of the whole figure, a yielding stroke correctly placed at the top of the upper trigram Dui, past the seat of authority and past any point at which the load could still be adjusted. Great Preponderance has been describing a structure carrying more than it should from its first line onward, and this is where the carrying stops being a structural question and becomes a personal one. What is at stake is no longer the beam. It is the person in the river.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Dui becomes Qian and the figure becomes Coming to Meet, King Wen 44, in which a single yielding stroke appears at the bottom beneath five strong ones. Read from the top of Great Preponderance, that destination is a plain statement of scale. What is given up here is complete, and whatever follows begins again from one small thing entering at the very bottom.