Splitting Apart, Line 5

The fifth line turns the hexagram around without changing a single circumstance. Legge's translation shows its subject leading the others on like a string of fishes and obtaining for them the favour that lights on the inmates of the palace, with advantage in every way. Nothing has been repaired. The couch is still overturned and the four yielding strokes below are the same four that stripped it. What has changed is that they are now arranged, moving together, and moving toward something above them.

The string of fishes carries the whole idea. Fish threaded on a line are as numerous as before and no longer scattered, and the ordering is what makes them presentable at a palace gate. Splitting Apart is not reversed here by anyone opposing it, which the Judgment has already ruled out, but by the elements of the decline being brought into a sequence that leads somewhere other than downward.

A yielding stroke stands in this odd position, incorrect by the letter of the rule, yet it is central in the upper trigram Gen and it rules the hexagram. Softness at the ruling seat is exactly what allows the leading to work, since these followers could not be commanded and had to be gathered instead. Placed directly beneath the one firm line at the summit, this stroke submits to it and brings the rest with it, which is how a hexagram of universal misfortune arrives at advantage in every respect.

A querent drawing this changing line is being handed the one genuinely constructive instruction in Splitting Apart, and it is not the instruction most people want. Do not try to reverse the decline, which the hexagram has already ruled out. Instead take whatever is still moving, however diminished, and put it in order behind a single direction. Readings land here on the reorganisation of a shrinking department, the sorting of an estate, a household rebuilding routine after a shock, and the quiet consolidation that follows a loss.

The promise attached is unusually broad for this hexagram: advantage in every respect. It is worth reading carefully, since it does not restore anything that was lost. What it offers is that the remainder, once ordered, becomes acceptable somewhere it would not have been acceptable while scattered, which is what the palace favour in the image describes.

As the ruling line, yielding in a firm place yet central in the upper trigram Gen and standing directly under the sole firm stroke above, this position leads by gathering rather than by commanding. A querent in charge of something diminished should take that literally. Authority here comes from being the point everyone else can line up behind, and from visibly deferring to the one thing in the situation that has held. Counting honestly what remains, and giving it a single order to follow, is the entire task.