The Clinging, Line 6

The topmost line takes the hexagram's brightness out of doors. Legge's translation has the king employing the subject in his punitive expeditions, where he achieves admirable merit, breaks only the chiefs of the rebels, and does not punish those prisoners who were not their associates, and the outcome is no error. The commentary on the image says the object is to bring the regions to a correct state, which limits the undertaking to correction rather than to conquest.

The distinction between chiefs and followers is the content of the line, and it is a legal distinction belonging to the period the text comes from rather than a modern scruple read back into it. A punitive expedition against a rebellious region was an instrument of Zhou royal government, and the text specifies how far it may go: to the leaders, and no further. What is praised is the discrimination, and a bright figure ends here because discrimination is what light is for.

The stroke is strong in an even seat, incorrect by the ordinary rule, at the very top of the upper trigram Li. Extremity of position is where most hexagrams show things going wrong, and the classic usually distrusts a strong line at the summit. Here it is given a task in which force is legitimate and then bounded by clarity, which is the only shape under which this hexagram will approve of force at all.

Nine at the top is the hexagram's counsel on the use of force, and it is a counsel about accuracy rather than about restraint. The querent is shown authorised to act, acting, and earning commendation for it, and the commendation is tied to a single fact: the chiefs are broken and the followers are let go. A reading landing here concerns a situation that genuinely requires decisive action and will be judged entirely on how precisely that action is aimed.

The material is period-bound and is given as the text has it. The image is a royal punitive expedition of the Zhou, and the mercy it describes operates inside a penal practice rather than as an alternative to one. What survives the change of setting is the operating principle, which is that clarity is what earns the right to act. The course the line implicitly rejects, punishing everyone caught up in a situation because sorting them is difficult, is a failure of light rather than an excess of severity.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Li becomes Zhen and the figure becomes Abundance, King Wen 55, brightness joined to movement, fullness at its height and the sun at noon. The destination suits a line that has just concluded a matter successfully, and it carries the classic's standing caution with it. Fullness is never described in these texts without the hour that follows it, and light that has done its work is on the clock like everything else.