Abundance, Line 6

The sixth line of Abundance (King Wen 55) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the house made great and the establishment screened, peering through the door and finding it still and no one there, for three years nothing is seen, evil. 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 topmost 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 sixth 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 House Made Great and the Establishment Screened, 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 sixth 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 proper to 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 house made great and the establishment screened, peering through the door and finding it still and no one there, for three years nothing is seen, evil, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The sixth line corresponds by classical convention with the third line, and the two correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Zhen in the upper position of the figure, the line marks the far edge of the hexagram, past the point the ruling fifth line governs, 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 sixth line of Abundance turns Zhen into Li while the other trigram, Li, stays as it is, which yields Abundance's changing partner, The Clinging (King Wen 30), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.