Abundance, Line 4

The fourth line of Abundance (King Wen 55) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the screen so thick the stars are seen at midday, meeting the lord who is his equal, good fortune. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress and development; when a king has reached this point there is no need for anxiety, let him be like the sun at noon, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the lowest place of the upper trigram Zhen, thunder in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Li, fire in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads thunder and lightning together; the superior man decides litigation and apportions punishment with exactness, and the fourth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Li 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, The Screen So Thick the Stars Are Seen, 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 fourth place of Abundance reads within the hexagram's overall concern with progress and development; when a king has reached this point there is no need for anxiety, let him be like the sun at noon. 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 the screen so thick the stars are seen at midday, meeting the lord who is his equal, good fortune, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The fourth line corresponds by classical convention with the first 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 upper position of the figure, the line marks the first word of the upper trigram, close enough to the ruling fifth line to be shaped by it, 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 fourth line of Abundance turns Zhen into Kun while the other trigram, Li, stays as it is, which yields Abundance's changing partner, Darkening of the Light (King Wen 36), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.