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The Line Statement and A Screen Thick Enough to Hide the Stars

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The Line Statement and A Screen Thick Enough to Hide the Stars

The second line of Abundance (King Wen 55) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the screen so thick that the stars can be seen at midday, going forward would meet with distrust, but sincerity that moves others brings good fortune. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress and development; when a king has reached this point there is no need for anxiety, let him be like the sun at noon, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the middle place of the lower trigram Li, fire in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Zhen, thunder in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads thunder and lightning together; the superior man decides litigation and apportions punishment with exactness, and the second line takes its place inside that combined picture of Li below and Zhen above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Li is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, A Screen Thick Enough to Hide the Stars, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.

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