Innocence, Line 5

Legge's translation places at the fifth position a subject free from insincerity who has nonetheless fallen ill, directs that no medicine be used, and promises occasion for joy in the recovery that follows. The instruction is startling in a book that generally counsels action, and it depends entirely on the diagnosis: the trouble did not arise from anything wrong in the sufferer, so nothing in the sufferer needs correcting.

This is the ruling line of the hexagram, a strong stroke correctly placed in an odd position and central to the upper trigram Qian. That authority is what allows the text to prescribe inaction so confidently. Commentary reads the medicine as any forced remedy, and treats reaching for one as the mistake, since an intervention aimed at a fault that is not there can only disturb something already sound.

Placed within the figure's arc, the fifth position completes the argument the third began. The third showed misfortune arriving at the innocent from outside; the fifth shows what to do about it, which is very nearly nothing. Left alone, an affliction with no root in the sufferer runs its course and passes, and the joy the text promises belongs to a recovery nobody had to engineer.

Do less. Someone drawing this changing line is being told that the difficulty they face has no cause in them, that it will resolve of itself, and that active intervention is the one thing likely to prolong it. The instruction to use no medicine is the text's own, and it is the rare piece of counsel in this book that asks a querent to sit still while something unpleasant works itself out.

Distinguishing this from ordinary passivity is the whole skill of reading the line. The prescription depends on the trouble being genuinely innocent in origin, and the hexagram has already established, at its third position, what such a trouble looks like: damage arriving from outside and landing on someone who did nothing to attract it. Where a difficulty does have a root in the querent's own conduct, this is not the line describing it.

Central and correctly placed in the upper trigram Qian, this is the ruling position of Wu Wang, which is why its counsel carries the weight it does. The joy promised at the end is not the joy of a cure but of a recovery that arrived on its own, and a reading here is an instruction to make room for that rather than to go looking for something to fix. Patience of this particular kind, applied to a trouble with no root in the querent at all, is what the line asks for, and it is a harder discipline in practice than it sounds on the page.