Gathering Together, Line 6

The sixth line of Gathering Together (King Wen 45) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as sighing and weeping without result, no error, though not yet resting easy in the topmost place. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns union and being collected, docile obedience leading on to satisfaction; the king approaches his temple, and firm correctness brings advantage, 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 Dui, lake in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Kun, earth in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads a marsh raised above the earth; the superior man keeps his weapons of war in good repair against contingencies not yet foreseen, and the sixth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Kun below and Dui above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Dui is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Sighing and Weeping Without Result, 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 Gathering Together reads within the hexagram's overall concern with union and being collected, docile obedience leading on to satisfaction; the king approaches his temple, and firm correctness brings advantage. 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 sighing and weeping without result, no error, though not yet resting easy in the topmost place, 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 do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Dui 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 Gathering Together turns Dui into Qian while the other trigram, Kun, stays as it is, which yields Gathering Together's changing partner, Standstill (King Wen 12), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.