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The Line Statement and The House Made Great and the Establishment Screened

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The Line Statement and The House Made Great and the Establishment Screened

The sixth 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 house made great and the establishment screened, peering through the door and finding it still and no one there, for three years nothing is seen, evil. 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 topmost place of the upper trigram Zhen, thunder in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Li, fire 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 sixth 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 Zhen is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The House Made Great and the Establishment Screened, 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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