Breakthrough, Line 3

The third line of Breakthrough (King Wen 43) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as strong and determined looks that invite evil, yet the superior man, resolute, walks alone and gets clear in the end. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns the culprit's guilt exhibited at the royal court, with sincere and earnest appeal, and a consciousness of the peril in cutting the criminal off, 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 lower trigram Qian, heaven in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Dui, lake in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads the waters of a marsh mounted above heaven; the superior man bestows his gifts on those below rather than letting them accumulate unused, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Qian below and Dui above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Qian is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Strong and Determined Looks That Invite Evil, 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 third place of Breakthrough reads within the hexagram's overall concern with the culprit's guilt exhibited at the royal court, with sincere and earnest appeal, and a consciousness of the peril in cutting the criminal off. 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 strong and determined looks that invite evil, yet the superior man, resolute, walks alone and gets clear in the end, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The third line corresponds by classical convention with the sixth line, and the two correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Qian in the lower position of the figure, the line marks the hinge between the two trigrams, the last word the lower trigram gets before the upper trigram takes over, 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 third line of Breakthrough turns Qian into Dui while the other trigram, Dui, stays as it is, which yields Breakthrough's changing partner, The Joyous (King Wen 58), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.