The third line of Inner Truth (King Wen 61) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as meeting his mate, now beating the drum and now stopping, now weeping and now singing. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns reaching even pigs and fish, good fortune, advantage in crossing the great stream, advantage in being firm and correct, 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 lower trigram Dui, lake in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Xun, wind in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads wind above the waters of a marsh; the superior man deliberates carefully over criminal cases and delays the infliction of death, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Dui below and Xun above.
Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Dui is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Meeting His Mate, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.