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The Line Statement and The Wanderer Finding a Resting Place

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The Line Statement and The Wanderer Finding a Resting Place

The fourth line of The Wanderer (King Wen 56) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the wanderer finding a resting place and the means to travel, yet his heart is not at ease. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns some small attainment and progress for the stranger who is firm and correct as he travels, 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 Li, fire in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Gen, mountain in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads fire above a mountain; the superior man uses wisdom and caution in punishments, and does not let litigation drag on, and the fourth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Gen below and Li above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Li is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Wanderer Finding a Resting Place, 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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