Before Completion, Line 3

The third line of Before Completion (King Wen 64) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as before completion, advance would be evil, but there is advantage in crossing the great stream. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress and success, like a young fox that has almost crossed the stream when its tail gets wet, so there is no advantage in any direction yet, 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 Kan, water in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Li, fire in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads fire above water; the superior man carefully discriminates among the qualities of things and the positions they naturally occupy, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Kan below and Li above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Kan is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Advancing Before the Moment is Ready, 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, six at the third place of Before Completion reads within the hexagram's overall concern with progress and success, like a young fox that has almost crossed the stream when its tail gets wet, so there is no advantage in any direction yet. The line occupies a place that does not match 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 before completion, advance would be evil, but there is advantage in crossing the great stream, 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, Kan 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 yin to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the third line of Before Completion turns Kan into Xun while the other trigram, Li, stays as it is, which yields Before Completion's changing partner, The Cauldron (King Wen 50), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.