The Sun Past Noon, the Earthen Drum and the Groaning of an Old Man

The third line stands at the top of the lower trigram, where the first of the hexagram's two fires has finished burning, and the text gives it the image of the setting sun. Legge's translation offers a choice between two responses. The subject might beat on his instrument of earthenware and sing to it; instead he utters the groans of an old man of eighty, and the outcome is evil. The commentary asks only how a position like that of the declining sun could be expected to continue long.

The pairing of vessel and lament carries the substance of the line. An earthen drum is the plainest instrument there is, and singing over it is what a person does who has accepted the hour they are in. The alternative offered is not resistance but complaint, and the classic is precise that the misfortune attaches to the complaint rather than to the setting. The sun goes down in either case.

The stroke is strong in an odd place, correct by the ordinary rule, and it has moved past the centre of its trigram. Correctness of position protects nothing at a turning point, because what defines the third line is not its own quality but its location at the join where one brightness ends and the next has not yet caught. In a doubled figure of fire, the moment between the two flames is where a person finds out what they do about endings.