Abundance, Line 3

The third line of Abundance (King Wen 55) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as a curtain so large it hides even the small stars at midday, breaking the right arm, no great error. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress and development; when a king has reached this point there is no need for anxiety, let him be like the sun at noon, 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 Li, fire in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Zhen, thunder in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads thunder and lightning together; the superior man decides litigation and apportions punishment with exactness, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Li below and Zhen 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, A Curtain Hiding Even the Small Stars, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.

As a divinatory line, nine at the third place of Abundance reads within the hexagram's overall concern with progress and development; when a king has reached this point there is no need for anxiety, let him be like the sun at noon. 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 a curtain so large it hides even the small stars at midday, breaking the right arm, no great error, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The third line corresponds by classical convention with the sixth line, and the two correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Li in the lower position of the figure, the line marks the hinge between the two trigrams, the last word the lower trigram gets before the upper trigram takes over, one stage in the six stage movement the hexagram traces from its first line to its last.

A change at this line, from yang to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the third line of Abundance turns Li into Zhen while the other trigram, Zhen, stays as it is, which yields Abundance's changing partner, The Arousing (King Wen 51), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.