The Arousing, Line 3

The third line of The Arousing (King Wen 51) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as distraught amid the startling movements, but action taken avoids error. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns ease and development; when the movement comes the subject looks out with apprehension, and yet is found smiling and talking cheerfully after, for the shock terrifies for a hundred miles while he does not let fall the sacrificial spoon and cup, 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 Zhen, thunder in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Zhen, thunder in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads thunder repeated; the superior man is fearful and apprehensive, cultivates his virtue, and examines his faults, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Zhen below and Zhen above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Zhen is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Being Distraught Amid the Startling Movements, 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, six at the third place of The Arousing reads within the hexagram's overall concern with ease and development; when the movement comes the subject looks out with apprehension, and yet is found smiling and talking cheerfully after, for the shock terrifies for a hundred miles while he does not let fall the sacrificial spoon and cup. The line occupies a place that does not match 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 distraught amid the startling movements, but action taken avoids error, 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, Zhen 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 yin to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the third line of The Arousing turns Zhen into Li while the other trigram, Zhen, stays as it is, which yields The Arousing's changing partner, Abundance (King Wen 55), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.