Darkening of the Light, Line 3

The third line is where the darkening is struck at its head. Legge's translation places the subject hunting in the south, taking the great chief of the darkness, and then warns in the same breath that he should not be eager to set everything right at once. The two halves pull against each other on purpose. The decisive act succeeds, and the classic spends the remainder of the line telling the successful party to slow down.

The south belongs to fire and to brightness in the standard correspondence, and this stroke is the topmost line of the lower trigram Li, the strongest and most exposed point the light occupies before the earth begins. It is yang in an odd place and therefore correctly placed, and it stands opposite the topmost line of the figure, where the classic puts the dark ruler. The confrontation is structural rather than incidental: this is the only line that faces the source of the darkening across the whole hexagram.

What the warning adds is the difference between removing a person and removing a condition. The great chief is taken and the darkness is not thereby over, because what produced him is a settled arrangement, and settled arrangements outlast the people at the top of them. The classic does not withdraw the victory. It declines to let a reader treat the victory as the end of the work, which is the same restraint the judgement of the hexagram asks for when it says the difficulty of the position must be realised.

Nine in the third place is a success that comes with an instruction attached, and the instruction is the part a querent tends to skip. The line shows a hunt in the south that takes the chief of the darkness, and then says not to be eager to correct everything at once. Read divinatorially, this is for somebody about to win the confrontation they have been preparing for, and who will be tempted to treat the win as a mandate.

The temptation is worth naming plainly. A person who has just removed the visible cause of a long obstruction has both the standing and the appetite to reorder everything that obstruction touched, and the classic says the appetite is now the risk, not the adversary. This stroke is strong, correctly placed, and at the top of the trigram of clear sight, which is exactly the combination that produces overreach.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Li becomes Zhen and the figure becomes Return, King Wen 24, a single strong line reappearing at the very bottom after everything above it has gone yielding. The destination is the pace the warning asks for. A darkness broken at its head does not become brightness. It becomes the first faint movement of something turning, and the work after the hunt is the slow work of a thing coming back rather than the fast work of putting everything right.