Divinity Atlas

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The Line Statement and Dragging Back the Wheel of His Carriage

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The Line Statement and Dragging Back the Wheel of His Carriage

The first line of After Completion (King Wen 63) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as dragging back the wheel of his carriage and wetting the tail of a fox, no error. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress in small matters, advantage in being firm and correct, good fortune at the beginning but there may be disorder at the end, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the lowest place of the lower trigram Li, fire in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Kan, water in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads water above fire; the superior man thinks beforehand of evil that may come, and guards against it, and the first line takes its place inside that combined picture of Li below and Kan 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, Dragging Back the Wheel of His Carriage, 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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