Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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The Line Statement and The Superior Man's Sincere Brilliance

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The Line Statement and The Superior Man's Sincere Brilliance

The fifth line of Before Completion (King Wen 64) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as firm correctness brings good fortune and no regret, the superior man's brilliance is sincere, and there is good fortune. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress and success, like a young fox that has almost crossed the stream when its tail gets wet, so there is no advantage in any direction yet, 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 upper trigram Li, fire in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Kan, water in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads fire above water; the superior man carefully discriminates among the qualities of things and the positions they naturally occupy, and the fifth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Kan below and Li 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, The Superior Man's Sincere Brilliance, 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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