Deliverance, Line 3

The third line of Deliverance (King Wen 40) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as one carrying a burden yet riding in a carriage, inviting robbers to approach, a case for firm correctness to guard against humiliation. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns advantage found in the southwest, and if no further operations are called for, good fortune in returning to the old conditions; where there is somewhere to go, early action brings good fortune, 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 Kan, water in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Zhen, thunder in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads thunder and rain; the superior man forgives errors and deals leniently with crimes, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Kan below and Zhen 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, Carrying a Burden Yet Riding in a Carriage, 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 third place of Deliverance reads within the hexagram's overall concern with advantage found in the southwest, and if no further operations are called for, good fortune in returning to the old conditions; where there is somewhere to go, early action brings good fortune. 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 one carrying a burden yet riding in a carriage, inviting robbers to approach, a case for firm correctness to guard against humiliation, 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 do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Kan 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 yin to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the third line of Deliverance turns Kan into Xun while the other trigram, Zhen, stays as it is, which yields Deliverance's changing partner, Duration (King Wen 32), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.