Nourishment, Line 4

The fourth line repeats the second line's gesture and reverses its verdict. Both turn to the height for nourishment. The second is told this brings evil, the fourth that it brings good fortune. Legge's translation supplies the difference in the image that follows, a tiger's gaze fixed downward and steady, with desire that presses on and on, and no fault in any of it. The same act performed from a different position, and with a different quality of attention, becomes a different act altogether.

Three things separate the two lines. This stroke is yielding in an even place, which is correct; it opens the upper trigram Gen, mountain and stillness, so its dependence is held rather than restless; and it stands directly beneath the strong sixth line, which the hexagram treats as the source from which nourishment proceeds. The fourth line therefore looks up to something genuinely above it and genuinely able to provide, whereas the second line looked up to a yielding fifth that had nothing to give.

The tiger's stare is the part of the image that repays attention. It is not a picture of ferocity but of unwavering focus, a gaze that does not wander to whatever else happens to be moving nearby. Set against the envious slack jaw of the first line, this is the hexagram's portrait of legitimate need: fixed on the correct source, sustained without embarrassment, and answered.

Six in the fourth place is read as permission to rely on somebody above, and the contrast the hexagram itself sets up is worth drawing out. The second line made the same upward approach and was told it brought misfortune. This line is told the opposite, and the whole difference lies in whether the source approached is actually able and obliged to answer. A querent landing here is being told that the support they are looking to is real, that asking for it is not a failure of independence, and that persistence in the asking is appropriate.

The tiger's steady downward gaze, with desire pressing on and on, is the conduct the line prescribes. It rules out two failures at once: the wandering attention that the opening line's slack jaw depicts, and the diffuse solicitation of the second line, which reached in every direction and secured nothing. What is asked for instead is a single fixed object of attention and an unembarrassed persistence toward it. The line sits at the base of the upper trigram Gen, mountain, so that persistence is steady rather than agitated.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Gen becomes Li and the figure becomes Biting Through, King Wen 21, which concerns removing an obstruction by decisive means. The movement suggests where a well directed reliance leads. Not to permanent dependence, but to the point at which whatever stands between the querent and what they need is dealt with directly.