Solitary in the Estrangement, and the Meeting of Two Strong Lines

The fourth line is alone and finds somebody. Legge's translation shows its subject solitary amid the disunion, meeting a good man, blending sincere desires with him, and standing in a position of peril where there will nonetheless be no mistake. Loneliness is stated first and it is not treated as a mood. It is a structural fact about where the line stands in the figure.

The reason is that this stroke has no proper correlate. It is strong in an even place and therefore incorrectly seated at the base of the upper trigram Li, and the line it would answer at the foot of the figure is strong as well, so the ordinary rule leaves it no partner anywhere. What the text describes is two lines of the same kind coming together with no structural warrant for doing so, which is the characteristic move of this hexagram. When the proper connections have failed, likeness does the work that correspondence usually does.

Peril is named and then set aside. The classic does not pretend the position is safe, because a connection made outside the ordinary pattern has no support beyond itself, and the sincerity of both parties is the only thing holding it up. That is why the text specifies the blending of desires rather than an agreement or an alliance. What makes the meeting hold is that neither man is performing it for anybody, in a hexagram where almost everything else is being misread by somebody.