Hard and Soft (Gang Rou)

Do not fight a temperament — lead it

Charts are not uniformly hard or soft; some elements are rigid and others pliant, and a good reading does not meet rigidity with force. The instruction is to guide the disposition instead: give a hard structure something to become, and a soft structure something to lean on. This is the earliest statement in the book of what later readers call 'following the qi' — restraint is a technique, not a punishment.