Deliverance (Kieh)

Deliverance (Kieh), also called Loosing and numbered Hexagram XL, concerns what should follow the removal of obstruction: restore familiar conditions when no further action is needed, but complete necessary operations promptly. Its commentary turns this counsel into a political programme for a kingdom emerging from conquest—recovery requires both restraint toward inherited customs and decisive action against what still threatens peace and order.

Meaning and central counsel

The hexagram’s name signifies loosing: untying a knot or unravelling a complication. The text locates the favourable direction in the south-west and distinguishes between two circumstances. If no further operations are called for, good fortune lies in returning to the old conditions; if operations remain necessary, good fortune lies in conducting them early. Deliverance is therefore not simply the end of danger. It is a moment of judgment about whether intervention has finished its work, and about how quickly unfinished work must be completed.

Restoration after conquest

The commentary reads the hexagram as a guide to governing after the obstruction and difficulty associated with the preceding hexagram have been removed. If the country has been subdued and no further active operations are needed, the new masters should let affairs return to their old channels. They should not be anxious to change all the conquered people’s manners and ways. As an example, the commentary invokes the Duke of Zhou’s treatment of the subdued people of Shang.

Where further operations are required to complete the subjugation of the country, however, delay is harmful: they should be carried through without delay. The hexagram’s counsel thus balances continuity with completion. The return to familiar arrangements is not an excuse to leave the work of pacification unfinished; nor is the authority of the new rulers a warrant to remake every inherited custom.

The lines and the work of order

The commentary finds an additional task in the lines: the removal of “small men,” understood as unworthy ministers or officers. The fifth line belongs to the ruler, who is charged with perfecting the hexagram’s meaning by removing whatever contradicts peace and good order. With help from the strong correlate in the second line, the ruler can remove these disruptive figures; the commentary says that even the small men may then change their ways and come to him.

The sixth line stands at the top of the figure but is not the ruler’s position. Its subject is therefore represented as a feudal duke, whose action carries the hexagram’s purpose against the small men. The line’s image is a prince shooting at a falcon on a high wall and hitting it, an action described as advantageous in every way. Read alongside the fifth line, this image assigns the final act of enforcement not to the sovereign alone but also to a subordinate authority acting within the restored order.

A text interpreted through its figures

Deliverance exemplifies the book’s method of connecting a hexagram’s overall counsel with the meanings assigned to its separate lines. King Wen interprets each hexagram as a whole, while the Duke of Zhou begins with the bottom line and gives each line a symbolic illustration; the commentary says that the interpretation of the whole should accord with the combined significance of the six lines. It also warns that a line’s meaning depends on the hexagram’s subject and on the line’s position and relation to its correlate. The political reading of Deliverance is thus presented as an interpretation drawn from the figure, not as a free-standing account of a historical campaign.