The Wanderer, Line 5

The fifth line of The Wanderer (King Wen 56) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as shooting a pheasant and losing the first arrow, but praise and a fitting charge come to him in the end. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns some small attainment and progress for the stranger who is firm and correct as he travels, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the middle place of the upper trigram Li, fire in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Gen, mountain in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads fire above a mountain; the superior man uses wisdom and caution in punishments, and does not let litigation drag on, and the fifth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Gen below and Li above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Li is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Shooting a Pheasant and Losing the Arrow, 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 fifth place of The Wanderer reads within the hexagram's overall concern with some small attainment and progress for the stranger who is firm and correct as he travels. 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. It is also one of the two central lines of the hexagram, the place classical reading treats as the most balanced regardless of the line's own character. Its own text, that shooting a pheasant and losing the first arrow, but praise and a fitting charge come to him in the end, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The fifth line corresponds by classical convention with the second line, and the two do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Li in the upper position of the figure, the line marks the ruling stage of the hexagram, the place classical reading treats as its centre of authority, 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 fifth line of The Wanderer turns Li into Qian while the other trigram, Gen, stays as it is, which yields The Wanderer's changing partner, Retreat (King Wen 33), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.