Nourishment, Line 3

The third line is the most severe in the hexagram. Legge's translation describes turning away from nourishment and holding to what is contrary to what is correct, with evil as the outcome, and adds that for ten years no action should be taken and that nothing will be advantageous. The number is less a literal count than the classical way of naming a full cycle, a term long enough for a wrong course to be exhausted rather than merely interrupted. Where the second line asked in the wrong direction, this one refuses proper nourishment altogether.

The stroke is yielding in an odd place, incorrect by the standard rule, and it stands at the top of the lower trigram Zhen, thunder, at the point where movement is most agitated and least anchored. Commentary reads such a position as restlessness with nothing solid beneath it. In a hexagram whose subject is what a person takes in and what that intake makes of them, a line set against the correct source is not merely unfed. It has arranged its own habits around the refusal, which is why the correction is measured in years rather than in a single decision.

Those ten years are the line's real teaching. One bad choice is repaired by a better one, but a settled orientation is not, and the text declines to offer the quicker remedy a reader would prefer. Its counsel is stillness: not action in a better direction, which would only carry the same disposition somewhere new, but a full stop long enough for the disposition itself to change.

Six in the third place is among the least comfortable lines to draw. Its counsel is not that the querent should act differently but that they should not act at all, and it attaches a term of ten years to that restraint. Read divinatorially, this marks a situation where the problem is not a decision waiting to be corrected but a pattern that has become the way things are done, sustained long enough that any fresh initiative would carry the pattern along with it.

The stroke's position supports the harshness. A yielding line in an odd place is incorrect by the ordinary rule, and it occupies the top of the lower trigram Zhen, where movement is most restless and has the least support under it. Somebody in this position typically feels an urgent need to do something, and the line identifies that urgency as part of the difficulty rather than as the way out of it. The refusal of nourishment the text describes is rarely experienced as refusal from the inside. It feels like preference, or principle, or plain habit.

When this line changes, the lower trigram Zhen becomes Li and the figure becomes Grace, King Wen 22, ornament and outward form. Read against the line it comes from, that is a pointed destination rather than a consoling one: a course that has turned away from real nourishment resolves, if nothing else changes, into something that looks well arranged from outside. The ten years are the alternative the line recommends, and the alternative is patience without activity.