Pushing Upward, Line 3

The third line of Pushing Upward (King Wen 46) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as pushing upward into an empty city, no room for doubt. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns great progress and success, seeking to meet the great man need cause no anxiety, advance to the south brings good fortune, 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 Xun, wind in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Kun, earth in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads wood in the midst of the earth, growing; the superior man pays careful attention to his virtue and accumulates its small increases until it is high and great, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Kun 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, Pushing Upward into an Empty City, 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 Pushing Upward reads within the hexagram's overall concern with great progress and success, seeking to meet the great man need cause no anxiety, advance to the south brings good fortune. 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 pushing upward into an empty city, no room for doubt, 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 correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Xun 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 Pushing Upward turns Xun into Kan while the other trigram, Kun, stays as it is, which yields Pushing Upward's changing partner, The Army (King Wen 7), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.