Development, Line 4

The fourth line of Development (King Wen 53) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the geese gradually advancing to the trees, perhaps finding a flat branch to light on, no error. 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 lowest place of the upper trigram Xun, wind in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Gen, mountain 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 fourth 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 Xun is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Geese Gradually Advancing to the Trees, 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 fourth 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 gradually advancing to the trees, perhaps finding a flat branch to light on, no error, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The fourth line corresponds by classical convention with the first 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 upper position of the figure, the line marks the first word of the upper trigram, close enough to the ruling fifth line to be shaped by it, 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 fourth line of Development turns Xun into Qian while the other trigram, Gen, stays as it is, which yields Development's changing partner, Retreat (King Wen 33), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.