The third line of The Cauldron (King Wen 50) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the caldron's ears altered so its progress is stopped, the rich fat within left uneaten, but a fall of rain brings the occasion for regret to a good end. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns great progress and success, 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 Xun, wind in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Li, fire in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads wood entering into fire, the image of cooking; the superior man keeps every position correct and makes secure the appointment received from heaven, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Li above.
Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Xun is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Caldron's Ears Altered, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.