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The Line Statement and Catching Three Foxes in the Hunt

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The Line Statement and Catching Three Foxes in the Hunt

The second line of Deliverance (King Wen 40) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as catching three foxes in the hunt and receiving a yellow arrow, firm correctness brings good fortune. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns advantage found in the southwest, and if no further operations are called for, good fortune in returning to the old conditions; where there is somewhere to go, early action brings good fortune, 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 Kan, water 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 rain; the superior man forgives errors and deals leniently with crimes, and the second line takes its place inside that combined picture of Kan below and Zhen above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Kan is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Catching Three Foxes in the Hunt, 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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