The Abysmal, Line 2

The second line is the first firm thing in the hexagram. Legge's translation places the subject in the defile in peril and grants that he will get a little of the deliverance he seeks, with the commentary noting that he has not yet come out from his place. Both halves of that matter. Something is gained, it is explicitly a small something, and the person gaining it is still inside the danger while the gaining happens.

This stroke is strong and central in the lower trigram Kan, the single yang line held between two yielding ones that gives the trigram its whole character. Centrality is what allows the small gain. The line has kept its bearings, which the opening line had lost, and somebody who knows where they are can improve their position by degrees even when they cannot leave it. By the ordinary rule the placement is incorrect, a strong line in an even seat, and that incorrectness is why the gain is partial rather than complete.

The judgement of the hexagram turns on sincerity carried through danger, and this is the line where that becomes practical rather than aspirational. What the text refuses to offer is deliverance itself. It offers a little of it, which in a doubled trigram of peril is a real result, and it declines to let a reader mistake one small correct movement for a way out of the whole situation.

Nine in the second place tells a querent to cut their expectations down to the size of what is actually available and then to go after it. The line grants a little of the deliverance sought, and the qualifier does the work. A reading landing here concerns a situation that will not resolve in this movement and can be improved in this movement, and the error the line guards against is refusing a partial gain because a complete one was wanted.

The position supports a modest confidence. This is the strong central stroke of the lower trigram Kan, held between two yielding lines, which is the classical picture of firmness kept inside a dangerous situation rather than firmness that has escaped one. The querent has their bearings even though they have no exit, and the commentary is explicit that they have not yet come out from their place. Small attainments are exactly what a person with bearings and no exit is able to secure.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Kan becomes Kun and the figure becomes Holding Together, King Wen 8, in which many yielding lines gather around a single strong one. The movement names the resource this line has and the first line did not: other people. A little deliverance in a time of doubled danger tends to arrive as somebody else's willingness to close ranks, and that is what the transformation describes.