The Abysmal, Line 4

The fourth line is where the hexagram becomes courtly and, in the same gesture, unceremonious. Legge's translation describes a cup of spirits and a vessel of grain, with earthenware used alongside them, introduced through the window, and the verdict is that in the end there will be no error. Every detail is a reduction of the proper form. Bronze would have been the correct material and the door the correct route, and a vassal presenting himself to his ruler in ordinary times would have used both.

Those details belong to the Zhou court and they carry the reading. Earthenware in place of bronze, and a window in place of a door, describe a relationship maintained under conditions that make the usual observances impossible, and the text approves of it. The commentary on the image locates the point at the meeting of those above and those below. What has to survive a time of danger is the connection itself, not the apparatus normally used to express it.

The stroke is yielding in an even place, correct by the ordinary rule, standing at the base of the upper trigram Kan directly beneath the strong fifth line. That adjacency is the whole of its situation. This line has no strength of its own and does not need any, because what it is doing is reaching the one firm thing above it by the only route still open, and the text is satisfied that a plain offering delivered awkwardly is worth more here than a correct one that cannot be delivered at all.

Six in the fourth place counsels a querent to strip a relationship or an obligation back to what can actually be conveyed, and then to convey it. The image is precise about the reduction: cheap vessels instead of the proper ones, and a window instead of a door. Both are breaches of the form that would apply in ordinary times, and the line states that they end without error. What is approved is not informality for its own sake but the decision to keep something alive by whatever means the danger leaves available.

The position is unusually favourable for this hexagram. A yielding stroke correctly occupies an even place, and it stands immediately below the strong fifth line, the one stable thing in the upper trigram Kan. A reading landing here typically concerns access to a person or an institution that the ordinary channels no longer reach. The counsel is to use the irregular channel and to send something plain through it rather than waiting for conditions in which the proper approach becomes possible again.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Kan becomes Dui and the figure becomes Oppression, King Wen 47, constraint with the resources spent. The transformation is a caution rather than a contradiction. The window works while there is still something to pass through it, and a connection kept alive on plain fare has a limit, which is why the line values the offering being made now above the better one imagined later.