Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

The Line Statement and The Dense Clouds Without Rain

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
The Line Statement and The Dense Clouds Without Rain

The fifth line of Small Preponderance (King Wen 62) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as dense clouds without rain, coming from the western border, the prince shooting an arrow and taking his quarry from a cave. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress and attainment, but advantage in being firm and correct; small affairs may be undertaken but not great ones, as with a bird flying past that leaves its cry behind, for whom it is not fitting to ascend but only to descend, and there great 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 middle place of the upper trigram Zhen, thunder in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Gen, mountain in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads thunder above a mountain; the superior man in his conduct exceeds a little in humility, in mourning exceeds a little in sorrow, and in expenditure exceeds a little in economy, and the fifth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Gen below and Zhen above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Zhen is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Dense Clouds Without Rain, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.