Splitting Apart, Line 3

The third line is the single exemption in a hexagram of uniform bad verdicts. Legge's translation places its subject among the overthrowers and then declares that there will be no error. Everything around the line is unchanged. The company is the same company, the process is the same process, and the position inside it is the same position, yet the judgement reverses completely, and the reversal has to be accounted for by something other than circumstance.

The account is structural. Of the five yielding strokes in Splitting Apart, this one alone answers the firm line at the summit, the third and sixth positions being paired in the classical scheme of correspondence. It is therefore facing a different direction from its neighbours while standing in the same crowd. The others are part of the erosion; this line is attached to the one thing the erosion has not reached, and that attachment is the whole of its exemption.

Placement offers no help here. A yielding stroke in this odd position at the top of the lower trigram Kun is incorrect by the letter of the rule, so the line is not being rewarded for propriety. What it is being credited with is allegiance maintained where nobody could see it and nobody around it shared it. The hexagram is willing to say that a person can stand inside a collapse, be counted among those causing it, and still be without fault, provided what they are actually holding to is sound.

A querent drawing this changing line is inside something that is coming apart and is being counted as part of it. Colleagues at a firm behaving badly, a family member in a household making poor decisions, a member of an institution losing its way: the reading acknowledges that the association is real and that leaving is not on offer, since the line places its subject among the overthrowers rather than outside them. What it offers instead is that association need not become participation.

The grant of no error is the most valuable thing in this hexagram and it is also narrow. It is not a promise that the querent will escape the outcome, and it is not a defence they can offer to observers, who will quite reasonably judge by the company. It is an internal verdict about where their allegiance actually lies, and it holds only for as long as that allegiance is genuine rather than claimed.

The stroke is yielding in a firm place at the top of the lower trigram Kun, which gives it no formal standing at all, and it corresponds with the one firm line at the summit of the hexagram, which gives it everything else. A querent should read that as instruction about what to hold onto. Identify the person, the standard or the commitment in this situation that has not been compromised, stay connected to it deliberately, and accept that the connection may be invisible to everyone else for some time.