The Abysmal, Line 5

The fifth line holds the ruling place of the hexagram and makes the smallest possible claim from it. Legge's translation describes the water in the defile as not full enough to flow away, filled only to the border, and gives no error, while the commentary on the image observes that the greatness of the subject's work is not yet achieved. Nothing here is a triumph. The pit is level, the water is not spilling, and in a figure of doubled peril that is the whole of the good news and it is genuinely good news.

The stroke is strong, central and correctly placed, the only line in the hexagram to satisfy all three conditions at once, and it holds the middle of the upper trigram Kan. That combination is what permits containment. Water rising past its border floods whatever lies around it, and water that has not reached the border leaves the pit unfilled; this line stands exactly at the level where danger is neither spreading nor pretending to be over.

Read against the fourth line's improvised offering and the sixth line's entrenchment, this is the hexagram's model of what competence looks like in continuing danger. It does not promise an end to the situation, and the commentary is careful to say the work is not yet done. It promises that the situation is being held at its present size by somebody who is not trying to claim more than that.

Nine in the fifth place is the most favourable line in The Abysmal, and a querent should read its modesty as accuracy rather than as discouragement. Water filled only to the border of the pit, with no error, describes a situation that has stopped getting worse and has not begun to get better. The commentary adds that the work is not yet achieved. Taken together this is a reading about competent containment, and about resisting the urge to declare a difficulty over merely because it has stopped growing.

The position is the strongest available anywhere in the figure. This stroke is strong, central and correctly placed at the ruling seat of the upper trigram Kan, the only line in the hexagram to be all three at once, and that is why containment is possible here where it was not lower down. Somebody drawing this line usually has real authority over a dangerous situation and a limited mandate within it. What they can do is hold the level. What they cannot yet do is empty the pit.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Kan becomes Kun and the figure becomes The Army, King Wen 7, a single strong line commanding a mass of yielding ones under discipline. The movement suits the counsel exactly. Danger held steady by one competent centre becomes an organised undertaking, and the way out of mere containment runs through discipline rather than through any sudden relief.