The fourth line of The Arousing (King Wen 51) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the shock leaves him sunk in the mud. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns ease and development; when the movement comes the subject looks out with apprehension, and yet is found smiling and talking cheerfully after, for the shock terrifies for a hundred miles while he does not let fall the sacrificial spoon and cup, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.
Structurally the line stands at the lowest place of the upper trigram Zhen, thunder in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Zhen, thunder in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads thunder repeated; the superior man is fearful and apprehensive, cultivates his virtue, and examines his faults, and the fourth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Zhen 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 Shock Leaves Him Sunk in the Mud, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.