Decrease, Line 3

The third line of Decrease (King Wen 41) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as when three men travel together their number is decreased by one, when one man travels alone he finds a friend. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns sincerity in one who practices decrease brings great good fortune, freedom from error, firmness and correctness maintained, advantage in every movement, and even in the use of two small dishes for sacrifice, 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 Dui, lake in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Gen, mountain in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads a marsh beneath a mountain; the superior man restrains his wrath and represses his desires, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Dui below and Gen above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Dui is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Three Men Travelling, One Departs, 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 Decrease reads within the hexagram's overall concern with sincerity in one who practices decrease brings great good fortune, freedom from error, firmness and correctness maintained, advantage in every movement, and even in the use of two small dishes for sacrifice. 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 when three men travel together their number is decreased by one, when one man travels alone he finds a friend, 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, Dui 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 Decrease turns Dui into Qian while the other trigram, Gen, stays as it is, which yields Decrease's changing partner, Great Taming (King Wen 26), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.