Keeping Still, Line 3

The third line of Keeping Still (King Wen 52) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as keeping the loins still, separating the ribs beneath, the danger felt as a burning of the heart. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns resting like the back, so one loses all consciousness of self, walking in one's own courtyard and not seeing the persons in it, no error, 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 Gen, mountain in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads mountains standing one over another; the superior man does not let his thoughts go beyond his own position, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Gen below and Gen 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, Keeping the Loins Still, 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 Keeping Still reads within the hexagram's overall concern with resting like the back, so one loses all consciousness of self, walking in one's own courtyard and not seeing the persons in it, no error. 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 keeping the loins still, separating the ribs beneath, the danger felt as a burning of the heart, 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 Keeping Still turns Gen into Kun while the other trigram, Gen, stays as it is, which yields Keeping Still's changing partner, Splitting Apart (King Wen 23), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.