After Completion, Line 5

The fifth line of After Completion (King Wen 63) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the eastern neighbour who slaughters an ox is not equal in the result to the western neighbour's smaller sacrifice, which brings the blessing genuinely. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress in small matters, advantage in being firm and correct, good fortune at the beginning but there may be disorder at the end, 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 Kan, water 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 water above fire; the superior man thinks beforehand of evil that may come, and guards against it, and the fifth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Li below and Kan above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Kan is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Eastern Neighbour's Lavish Sacrifice, 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 fifth place of After Completion reads within the hexagram's overall concern with progress in small matters, advantage in being firm and correct, good fortune at the beginning but there may be disorder at the end. 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. 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 the eastern neighbour who slaughters an ox is not equal in the result to the western neighbour's smaller sacrifice, which brings the blessing genuinely, 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 correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Kan 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 yang to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the fifth line of After Completion turns Kan into Kun while the other trigram, Li, stays as it is, which yields After Completion's changing partner, Darkening of the Light (King Wen 36), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.