Divinity Atlas

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The Line Statement and Bringing Round Himself Whatever Can Give Pleasure

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The Line Statement and Bringing Round Himself Whatever Can Give Pleasure

The third line of The Joyous (King Wen 58) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as bringing round himself whatever can give pleasure, an evil course, since the place of the line is not the one appropriate to it. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress and attainment, but advantage lies in being firm and correct, 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 Dui, lake in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Dui, lake in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads two joined marshes, one above the other; the superior man encourages friends in conversation and in the practice they share, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Dui below and Dui above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Dui is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Bringing Round Himself Whatever Can Give Pleasure, 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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