The Family, Line 6

The topmost line closes the hexagram on character rather than on arrangement. Legge's translation shows its subject possessed of sincerity and arrayed in majesty, and says that in the end there will be good fortune. Both halves are load-bearing. Sincerity by itself would leave a household with nothing anybody defers to, and majesty by itself would be the display the third line has already condemned, so the line insists on the pair and gives neither alone.

This is the one stroke in the figure that is not correctly placed, strong in an even seat at the very top of the upper trigram Xun. The irregularity is doing work. Every other line in The Family stands where the rules say it should, which is the structural version of each member of a household occupying their proper station, and the last line steps outside that scheme in order to say what holds once the scheme runs out. Position accounts for the first five lines. It cannot account for this one.

The delay built into the verdict is the other half of the point. Good fortune comes in the end and not now, because dignity of this kind cannot be asserted or demonstrated on demand. It accumulates in other people over a long time, until it no longer needs asserting at all. The classic has spent five lines describing how a household is ordered from the outside, and finishes by naming what has to be true inside the person standing at the top of it.

Nine at the top is the closing counsel of The Family and the only line in it addressed to a person rather than to a position. Sincerity held with dignity brings good fortune in the end. A querent drawing it is being told that the arrangement they are asking about will not be settled by any further adjustment of roles, rules or resources, and that what remains is a question about their own conduct.

The two requirements pull against each other on purpose. Sincerity without weight gets overlooked inside a household, and weight without sincerity is the smirking and chattering of the third line inverted into something colder and no better. Holding both at once is the work, and the classic puts the good fortune at the end rather than at once because there is no quick way to establish it. What the line describes is the residue of how somebody has behaved over years.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Xun becomes Kan and the figure becomes After Completion, King Wen 63, every line correctly placed and the classic warning at once that so perfect an arrangement has already begun to decay. Reached from the top of The Family, that is a pointed destination. A household with everybody in the right place has achieved exactly what this hexagram describes, and the next figure says the achievement is the moment vigilance stops being optional.