Influence, Line 6

Climbing station by station, the hexagram ends at the mouth. Legge's translation shows the subject moving his jaws and tongue, and the commentary on the image dismisses the whole performance in a phrase: he only talks with volubility. No verdict of fortune or misfortune is attached, which puts this line in the same category as the first, and the parallel is instructive. At the toe there was not yet anything to judge; at the mouth there is nothing left to judge either.

The figure has climbed a body from the extremity upward and the mouth is the top of it. Everything below has been some form of being moved: a toe stirring, calves ready to walk, thighs gripping a leader, a restless mind, a numb stretch of back. Arriving at speech, the classic finds an influence converted entirely into words and treats that conversion as the end of its real force rather than as its culmination.

The stroke is yielding in an even seat, correct by the ordinary rule, at the top of the upper trigram Dui. Dui is the lake and its attribute is pleased satisfaction, which expresses itself as speech, so a soft line at its summit is that quality carried to an extreme. The line is not accused of dishonesty anywhere in the text. It is accused of volubility, of a mouth doing on its own what the whole body was supposed to be doing together.

Six at the top describes a situation that has been talked about instead of felt. A querent drawing it should look for the point at which an attraction, a negotiation or a persuasion turned into commentary on itself. The text gives no judgement, and the withheld judgement is the reading: the classic will not call this a misfortune, because nothing has been damaged, and it will not call it good fortune either, because nothing has been done.

The commentary's word is volubility, which names fluency rather than falsehood. That is what makes the line uncomfortable to receive. The person is not lying and may be perfectly sincere. They are simply doing all of it with the jaws and the tongue, at the end of a figure whose earlier lines have all been about a body committing itself, and an influence that reaches only the mouth arrives at the summit with nothing to show for the climb.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Dui becomes Qian and the figure becomes Retreat, King Wen 33, in which the superior person withdraws in good order while withdrawal is still possible and still dignified. Read from a line of exhausted talk, that destination is the correct instruction. When words have replaced the thing they were about, the useful move is not to say more of them but to step back and stop spending on it.