Opposition, Line 6

The topmost line is the hexagram's account of how estrangement ends, and it ends as a misperception corrected. Legge's translation shows the subject solitary amid the disunion, seeing a pig bearing a load of mud on its back and a carriage full of ghosts, bending his bow against what is approaching and then unbending it, because what comes is not an assailant but a near relative seeking a marriage connection. Going forward he meets rain, and there is good fortune.

The sequence is the whole line. First the approaching figure is repellent, then it is uncanny, then it is armed against, then the weapon is lowered, and only at the end is it correctly identified. The classic does not say the other party changed. It says the bow was unbent, which places the entire transformation in the person who was holding it, and that is the most direct statement anywhere in the figure about what disunion actually consists of.

This stroke is strong in an even seat at the very top of the upper trigram Li, incorrectly placed and as far from the rest of the hexagram as a line can stand. Its proper correlate is the third line, the one dragged back and punished, which is exactly the figure it has been seeing as a pig fouled with mud. The good end promised to the third line and the good fortune given here are one event described from the two ends of a single correspondence, and the rain that falls is the classic's standing image for a tension between two forces finally discharging.

Nine at the top resolves Opposition and it is addressed to the person who has been getting it wrong. The line shows a subject alone in the estrangement who sees a pig loaded with mud and a cart of ghosts, draws his bow against the approaching party, then lowers it on recognising a near relative coming about a marriage. Rain follows and the outcome is good. A querent drawing this line is being told that the hostility they have been reading in somebody is their own construction.

The two images are worth taking seriously as a description of how suspicion works. A pig fouled with mud is disgust and a cart of ghosts is dread, and the line puts them in that order because contempt usually arrives first and prepares the ground for fear. Neither is presented as a lie the other party told. They are what a person alone for long enough begins to see, and the drawn bow is the point at which seeing turns into doing.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Li becomes Zhen and the figure becomes The Marrying Maiden, King Wen 54, which the classic treats as an irregular and unequal union to be entered with full awareness of what it is. The destination follows the line's own last word, since the approaching party was coming about a marriage, and it withholds any suggestion that the reconciliation is tidy. What ends the estrangement is a real connection on imperfect terms, made by somebody who has just put a weapon down.