Holding Together, Line 6

The last line of Holding Together is the hexagram's only outright misfortune, and the reason given for it is a matter of timing rather than of character. Legge's translation shows the subject seeking union and attachment without having taken the first step toward such an end, and the small commentary closes the case flatly: there is no possibility of a good issue. Nothing is said about the sincerity of the wish. The line simply arrives after the moment in which the wish could have been acted on.

The Judgment of the hexagram anticipates this ending. It warns that those who come too late will fare badly, and the topmost line is where that warning is realized. Yielding at the top of the upper trigram Kan, past the ruling fifth place and outside its reach, the line has watched the whole process of attachment complete itself without joining in, and now finds the center already surrounded.

Read against the first line, the pairing is exact and deliberate. The opening six offered nothing but a full vessel of good faith and was promised further good fortune for it; the closing six offers a request at the end and is promised nothing. Between them the hexagram makes its plainest structural argument. Holding Together is not a state one can enter at any convenient point, because the bond it describes is built out of the whole sequence of steps that led to it, and a beginning never taken cannot be supplied afterward.

Six at the top is read as a hard line and it is worth reading honestly. As a changing line it tells a querent that the opportunity to join something has passed, that the approach now being contemplated comes after the point at which it could have counted, and that no favorable outcome is available on the present terms. The line does not blame. It reports that a first step was never taken, and that what is being attempted now depends on that step having been taken.

Flipping the yielding stroke to firm changes the upper trigram Kan into Xun, wind, and wind over earth gives Contemplation, King Wen 20, a figure about observing from a height rather than participating from within. The transformation is unexpectedly gentle and supplies what the line itself withholds. What is left to someone who has missed the moment is to look, to understand what was formed and how, and to be seen in turn, which is the discipline Contemplation describes.

A reading landing here counsels a querent to stop pressing an entry that will not open and to take up the position the transformation offers instead. Late attachment has no good issue in this hexagram, but clear observation of the thing one failed to join is not the same as exclusion from it, and it is the only ground from which a proper beginning could ever be made elsewhere.