Coming to Meet, Line 3

The third line of Coming to Meet (King Wen 44) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as one whose buttocks have lost their skin so he walks with difficulty, a position of peril but no great error. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns a bold, strong female met unexpectedly; not good to marry such a one, since she should not be long associated with, 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 Xun, wind in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Qian, heaven in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads wind beneath heaven; the sovereign delivers his charges and announcements to the four quarters, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Qian above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Xun is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The One Whose Buttocks Have Lost Their Skin, 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 Coming to Meet reads within the hexagram's overall concern with a bold, strong female met unexpectedly; not good to marry such a one, since she should not be long associated with. 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 one whose buttocks have lost their skin so he walks with difficulty, a position of peril but 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 do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Xun 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 Coming to Meet turns Xun into Kan while the other trigram, Qian, stays as it is, which yields Coming to Meet's changing partner, Conflict (King Wen 6), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.