Influence, Line 5

Holding the ruling seat, the fifth station is given almost nothing to feel. Legge's translation places the movement in the flesh along the spine above the heart and grants that there will be no occasion for repentance. The commentary on the image adds one dismissive remark: his aim is trivial. Between them they describe a station at which the influence has reached a part of the body that cannot register it and cannot act on it either.

The choice of location is deliberate in a figure built on anatomy. The back above the heart is behind a person, out of sight, and the flesh there is the least responsive tissue in the series the hexagram has been climbing. Where the calves could carry somebody away and the thighs could fasten onto a leader, this region does neither, so the absence of regret is achieved largely by the absence of anything happening.

The stroke is strong, central and correctly placed in the ruling seat of the upper trigram Dui, which by the ordinary rule is the best position available anywhere in the figure. The result is a useful corrective to that rule. A ruler perfectly placed, immune to being swayed and aiming at nothing worth aiming at, escapes every fault the hexagram catalogues and achieves none of the mutual influence the hexagram exists to describe.

Nine in the fifth place is easy to misread as a success. No occasion for repentance sounds like a clean result, and structurally the line is the strongest in the hexagram, firm and central and correct in the ruling seat. The commentary refuses the compliment: the aim is trivial. A querent drawing this line is being told that they are unlikely to go wrong and equally unlikely to accomplish anything that mattered.

Read against the rest of the figure the verdict makes sense. The hexagram's Image counsels keeping the mind open so that others may approach, and every line beneath this one describes some degree of being moved. A person who has arranged to be unreachable has solved the problem of the third line's handhold and has also opted out of influence altogether, which in this hexagram is the entire subject under discussion.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Dui becomes Zhen and the figure becomes Small Preponderance, King Wen 62, in which small things may be attempted and great ones may not, and the bird is counselled to fly low. The destination is candid about the scale available. Where the aim is trivial, the honest way forward is to attempt what is genuinely within reach and to stop mistaking an absence of error for an achievement.