Before Completion, Line 4

The fourth line of Before Completion (King Wen 64) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as firm correctness brings good fortune and every occasion for regret disappears, as if in the excitement of using energy to subdue a troublesome region for three years, receiving reward from a great state. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress and success, like a young fox that has almost crossed the stream when its tail gets wet, so there is no advantage in any direction yet, 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 Li, fire in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Kan, water in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads fire above water; the superior man carefully discriminates among the qualities of things and the positions they naturally occupy, and the fourth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Kan 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, Subduing a Troublesome Region for Three Years, 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 Before Completion reads within the hexagram's overall concern with progress and success, like a young fox that has almost crossed the stream when its tail gets wet, so there is no advantage in any direction yet. 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 firm correctness brings good fortune and every occasion for regret disappears, as if in the excitement of using energy to subdue a troublesome region for three years, receiving reward from a great state, 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 correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Li 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 Before Completion turns Li into Gen while the other trigram, Kan, stays as it is, which yields Before Completion's changing partner, Youthful Folly (King Wen 4), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.