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The Line Statement and Pushing Upward Blindly Even at the Summit

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The Line Statement and Pushing Upward Blindly Even at the Summit

The sixth line of Pushing Upward (King Wen 46) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as pushing upward blindly even at the summit, advantage in being unceasingly firm and correct, though the position cannot be maintained for long. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns great progress and success, seeking to meet the great man need cause no anxiety, advance to the south 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 topmost place of the upper trigram Kun, earth in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Xun, wind in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads wood in the midst of the earth, growing; the superior man pays careful attention to his virtue and accumulates its small increases until it is high and great, and the sixth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Kun above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Kun is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Pushing Upward Blindly Even at the Summit, 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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