Limitation, Line 3

The third line of Limitation (King Wen 60) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as one who acknowledges no limitation will have cause to lament, though the fault will lie with himself alone. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress and attainment, but if the regulations it sets are severe and difficult, they cannot be maintained for long, 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 Dui, lake in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Kan, water in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads water above a marsh; the superior man constructs his methods of numbering and measurement, and considers points of virtue and conduct, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Dui below and Kan 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, Acknowledging No Limitation at All, 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 Limitation reads within the hexagram's overall concern with progress and attainment, but if the regulations it sets are severe and difficult, they cannot be maintained for long. 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 who acknowledges no limitation will have cause to lament, though the fault will lie with himself alone, 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, Dui 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 Limitation turns Dui into Qian while the other trigram, Kan, stays as it is, which yields Limitation's changing partner, Waiting (King Wen 5), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.