After Completion, Line 3

The third line of After Completion (King Wen 63) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as a former ruler attacking the Devil's Country and conquering it in three years, small men should not be employed in the campaign. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress in small matters, advantage in being firm and correct, good fortune at the beginning but there may be disorder at the end, 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 Kan, water in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads water above fire; the superior man thinks beforehand of evil that may come, and guards against it, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Li below and Kan 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 Former Ruler Attacking the Devil's Country, 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 After Completion reads within the hexagram's overall concern with progress in small matters, advantage in being firm and correct, good fortune at the beginning but there may be disorder at the end. 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 former ruler attacking the Devil's Country and conquering it in three years, small men should not be employed in the campaign, 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 After Completion turns Li into Zhen while the other trigram, Kan, stays as it is, which yields After Completion's changing partner, Difficulty at the Beginning (King Wen 3), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.