Development, Line 3

The third line of Development (King Wen 53) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the geese advanced too far, onto the dry plains, a husband on expedition who does not return and a wife who conceives but does not nourish the child, evil, yet advantage in resisting plunderers. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns the marriage of a young lady, and the good fortune attending it, advantage in being firm and correct, 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 Gen, mountain in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Xun, wind in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads a tree above a mountain; the superior man attains to virtue that endures and makes the ways of the people good, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Gen below and Xun above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Gen is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Geese Advanced Too Far, 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 Development reads within the hexagram's overall concern with the marriage of a young lady, and the good fortune attending it, advantage in being firm and correct. 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 the geese advanced too far, onto the dry plains, a husband on expedition who does not return and a wife who conceives but does not nourish the child, evil, yet advantage in resisting plunderers, 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, Gen 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 Development turns Gen into Kun while the other trigram, Xun, stays as it is, which yields Development's changing partner, Contemplation (King Wen 20), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.