As a divinatory line, six at the sixth place of The Joyous reads within the hexagram's overall concern with progress and attainment, but advantage lies in being firm and correct. The line occupies a place proper to its own nature in the classical doctrine that odd places favour a firm, yang line and even places favour a yielding, yin line. Its own text, that pleasure found in leading and attracting others, though his own light is not yet brilliant, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.
The sixth line corresponds by classical convention with the third line, and the two do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Dui in the upper position of the figure, the line marks the far edge of the hexagram, past the point the ruling fifth line governs, one stage in the six stage movement the hexagram traces from its first line to its last.
A change at this line, from yin to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the sixth line of The Joyous turns Dui into Qian while the other trigram, Dui, stays as it is, which yields The Joyous's changing partner, Treading (King Wen 10), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.