Influence, Line 3

At the third station the influence reaches the thighs, the part of a body with no independent judgement about where it goes. Legge's translation shows the subject moving his thighs while keeping close hold of those whom he follows, and going forward on that basis brings occasion for regret. The commentary is unusually severe: he does not want to rest in his place, his will is set on following others, and what he holds in his grasp is low.

The image works because thighs carry a person wherever the body has already decided to go. Two stations earlier a toe stirred and the text passed no judgement on it; one station earlier the calves were told to stay still and promised good fortune for obeying. Here the movement has been conceded and the only question left is whose movement it is, and the answer the text gives is that it belongs to somebody else entirely.

The stroke is strong in an odd place, correct by the ordinary rule, at the top of the lower trigram Gen. That correctness saves nothing, which is worth noticing, because the fault described is not structural but a matter of direction. A firm line at the summit of the mountain trigram has the strength to hold its own ground and spends it instead on gripping whatever happens to be moving ahead of it.

Nine in the third place warns a querent that they are about to be carried. The line accuses nobody of weakness or of bad intent. It observes that the will has attached itself to other people, that the person is unwilling to stay where they are, and that going forward on that footing produces regret rather than harm, a distinction the classic keeps carefully throughout.

What makes the reading useful is the commentary's judgement that what the subject grasps is low. The object is not condemned as wrong so much as too small for the effort being spent on it, and that is the ordinary shape of the situation in practice: somebody joins a movement largely because it is moving, and finds out afterwards that the thing they held onto was not worth the distance travelled. Influence in this hexagram is meant to be received by an open mind, and being pulled along by a grip is its counterfeit.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Gen becomes Kun and the figure becomes Gathering Together, King Wen 45, people assembling around a centre with a leader and an offering. The destination reframes the fault rather than excusing it. There is a right way to be one among many, and it requires a genuine centre worth gathering at, which is precisely what the third line's low handhold is not.