Treading on the tiger's tail — and it does not bite. Lǚ is conduct in delicate circumstances: moving among the powerful, the dangerous, or the touchy, where survival depends on how you step.
Its secret is that the tiger does not bite the courteous. Good conduct here is not servility but precision: knowing your place without losing your dignity, proceeding cheerfully and simply amid risk. The one-eyed man who insists he sees perfectly is the one who gets bitten.
問Lǚ appears when a relationship requires careful stepping — a sensitive topic, a guarded heart, a difficult family. The counsel is tact without pretense: be simple and genuine rather than performing confidence you lack, and treat the other's sore points with the respect you would give a tiger's tail. Courtesy, here, is a form of love.
Professionally this is the hexagram of navigating hierarchy and powerful personalities. Its rules: know exactly whose tail you are near; do not claim capacities you lack in dangerous situations; keep conduct simple, consistent, and pleasant. The final line offers the review standard — judge yourself by the whole path walked, not the single step.
Inwardly, Lǚ examines how you carry yourself under scrutiny and risk. Its practice is the middle path between cringing and swaggering: resolute conduct with full awareness of danger. Walking that line daily — dignified, watchful, unhurried — is what eventually makes even tigers ordinary company.
A line speaks only when it is a changing line in your own casting.