After Completion, Line 6

The sixth line of After Completion (King Wen 63) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as wetting the head, a position of peril. 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 topmost 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 sixth 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, Wetting the Head, 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 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. Its own text, that wetting the head, a position of peril, 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, Kan 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 After Completion turns Kan into Xun while the other trigram, Li, stays as it is, which yields After Completion's changing partner, The Family (King Wen 37), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.