Retreat, Line 3

The third line cannot get away, and the reason is attachment. Legge's translation shows the subject retiring but bound, worn and ill with it and in peril, and adds that if he were to deal with those who bind him as in nourishing a servant or a concubine it would be fortunate, while the commentary on the image says the case admits of no great and decisive act. The bindings are people. This is a withdrawal held in place by dependents.

Servant and concubine are household categories of the society the text comes from, and the phrase belongs to that period rather than to any reading made of it now. What survives the change of setting is the structural point the line uses them to make, which is one of scale. These are small, personal, domestic obligations, and against them the text offers no great action whatever. It offers management. A retreat that cannot be completed can still be conducted correctly at the size of the people actually attached to it.

The stroke is strong in an odd place, correct by the ordinary rule, and it stands at the top of the lower trigram Gen where it meets the three firm lines of Qian above. Strength and correctness are not what fails here; proximity is. This line is close enough to what it is withdrawing from to be caught by it, and the illness the text names is the friction of a strong line pulling against a hold it stands too near to break.

Nine in the third place describes being held in place by the people one is responsible for, and it is one of the classic's more practical lines. The querent is trying to step out of a situation and is bound by ties that are not adversarial. The text calls this distressing and dangerous, then declines to recommend any decisive stroke, and the commentary is explicit that no great act is available. What is available is care, at the domestic scale the line names.

The vocabulary of servants and concubines is the household register of the period the text was set down in, and it is reported here as the text has it. Read for what the line is doing with it rather than for the arrangement it assumes, the counsel is that the obstacle is made of obligations to particular people, and that obligations of that kind are discharged by continuing to meet them rather than by any single resolution a querent can perform and be finished with.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Gen becomes Kun and the figure becomes Standstill, King Wen 12, in which heaven and earth move apart and nothing passes between them. That is the warning carried underneath the line's qualified good fortune. A retreat that stops being conducted, and simply stalls with the ties still attached, hardens into a blockage, and the difference between the two outcomes is whether the small daily obligations are still being kept.