The third line of Obstruction (King Wen 39) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as going forward leads to difficulty, so he returns and remains still. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns advantage found in the southwest, and the contrary in the northeast, advantage in seeing the great man, and 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 Gen, mountain 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 a mountain; the superior man turns round to examine himself and cultivates his virtue, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Gen below and Kan above.
Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Gen is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, He Returns and Remains Still, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.