Small Taming, Line 5

Legge gives the fifth line as the fifth nine, undivided, showing its subject possessed of sincerity and drawing others to unite with him, and being rich in resources he employs his neighbours in the same cause with himself. The image commentary is not separately extensive here, resting on the line text's own picture of a leader who does not act alone.

Nine in the fifth place is both central and correctly seated, an undivided line in an odd, honored position, and it rules the upper trigram Xun exactly as the fourth line supports it from below. Where the fourth line's sincerity averted danger through simple trust, the fifth line's sincerity actively draws others in, and its wealth of resources is explicitly not hoarded but shared with the neighboring lines.

This is the ruling position of the hexagram's upper trigram, the place from which the whole gentle restraint that Small Taming describes is ultimately directed, and Legge's line text frames its success as a matter of enlisting cooperation rather than commanding compliance.

Commentary tradition reads the fifth line's employment of neighbours as the clearest statement in the hexagram of restraint exercised through consent rather than command, the small force succeeding precisely because it never has to compel the strength arrayed around it.

As a changing line, nine in the fifth place describes leadership that succeeds by sharing rather than by hoarding, drawing neighboring lines into a common cause instead of directing them from a distance. Sitting central and correctly placed in the ruling position of Xun, the upper trigram, it is the line from which the hexagram's whole gentle restraint is exercised, and a reading here concerns exactly that kind of generous, cooperative authority.

Flipping this line changes the upper trigram from Xun to Gen, Mountain, giving Gen over Qian, the hexagram called Great Taming. Small Taming's picture of a slight, gentle force holding back a great one is replaced by its own larger counterpart, a hexagram of accumulated strength and virtue on a far greater scale, still restrained but now by something as solid and enduring as a mountain rather than by wind alone. The movement is from a small, personally shared restraint toward a great, structurally accumulated one, the same theme carried to a far larger scale.

In Small Taming's own arc, the fifth line is where the hexagram's gentle authority is actually seated, the ruling point the fourth line's sincerity ultimately serves. A reading landing here suggests that present success by sharing resources and drawing others in is not the limit of the pattern, but an early, smaller version of a far greater accumulation still to come.