The sixth line of Limitation (King Wen 60) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as limitation carried to the point of severity, firm correctness brings evil, though regret would disappear if the course changed. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress and attainment, but if the regulations it sets are severe and difficult, they cannot be maintained for long, 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 Kan, water in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Dui, lake in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads water above a marsh; the superior man constructs his methods of numbering and measurement, and considers points of virtue and conduct, and the sixth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Dui below and Kan 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, The Limitation Carried to the Point of Severity, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.