The Family, Line 4

The fourth line is the briefest in the hexagram and the most fortunate. Legge's translation has its subject enriching the family and gives great good fortune, with nothing qualified and nothing warned against. In a classic that hedges almost every favourable verdict it issues, an unhedged one is worth stopping on, and the reason for it turns out to be structural rather than a matter of the wealth itself.

The stroke is yielding and correctly placed in an even seat at the base of the upper trigram Xun, directly below the strong fifth line. It is the first line of the outer trigram, which is where a household meets whatever lies beyond it, and a yielding line in that position accumulates rather than asserts. Enrichment in this figure is not an achievement the fourth line claims. It is what accrues to a position that is correctly placed, adjacent to authority, and not in competition with it.

The trigram Xun is wind, and also penetration, the quality of getting in everywhere without force, and the Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads the figure as wind coming forth from fire. Set against that image, the fourth line is the station at which a household's ordering starts having effects outside its own walls. What comes back is described as wealth, and the classic gives it the largest praise anywhere in the hexagram without attaching one condition to it.

Six in the fourth place makes the only unqualified promise in The Family. It shows the household enriched and gives great good fortune, and a querent drawing it is being told that the accumulation currently underway is sound and needs no correction. Lines this favourable are rare enough in the classic that the honest thing is to say so plainly rather than to go hunting for a warning the text has not put there.

What the line does supply is a caution by omission. It is a yielding stroke and it enriches by being correctly positioned rather than by acquiring anything, so a reading landing here concerns a benefit arriving because an arrangement is working properly, not because of anybody's exertion. Treating the result as personally earned is the error the silence leaves room for, since nothing in the text credits initiative and the entire verdict rests on placement.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Xun becomes Qian and the figure becomes Fellowship, King Wen 13, people out in the open acting in concert beyond the ties of any single household. The destination says what a well provided family is for. Resources gathered inside a set of walls become, at this station, the capacity to associate with people outside them, and the classic treats that widening as the natural continuation of the fourth line rather than as a departure from it.