Return, Line 6

The topmost line is the failure the whole hexagram exists to warn against. Legge's translation describes being all astray on the subject of returning, and does not soften what follows: evil, calamities and errors together, armies put in motion under such views ending in a great defeat that reaches the ruler of the state, and ten years insufficient to repair the damage. This is among the heaviest judgments in the book, and it is attached not to an error but to the refusal to turn back from one.

Distance explains the severity. The single returning light sits at the very bottom of the figure and this line sits at the very top, as far from the turning point as the hexagram allows, with the entire body of the upper trigram Kun lying between them. Every other line found some way back. This one has moved past the last position from which a return was still available, and the text treats that as a different order of fault.

The reference to defeated hosts and a ruined state extends the consequence well beyond the individual. Calamities from within and errors from without arrive together, which is the classical picture of a failure both self caused and externally punished. Return closes on this note so that its central claim cannot be missed: the fault was never the straying, and it was always the refusal to come back.

Drawn as a changing line, the top position is one of the plainest warnings in the whole book. A querent here is being told that a course has been carried past the point where correcting it would have been simple, and that continuing to act from it, particularly on any large scale, will produce consequences far beyond the original mistake. The reference to armies put in motion is the classical form of that scale: a private error becomes a public disaster once it is committed to at size.

The ten years named in the text set the timescale for repair. Nothing in the line says the situation is beyond recovery, but it insists that recovery will now be long, costly, and largely out of the querent's hands, which is exactly the difference between this position and the first one. The counsel is to stop committing further rather than to expect any quick correction.

Standing at the top of the upper trigram Kun, at the maximum distance from the returning light at the base, this line is the hexagram's own account of what happens when its counsel is ignored to the end. A reading landing here is not fatalistic. It is a description of the price of delay, offered by a hexagram whose opening line already showed how cheaply the same turn could have been made.