Pushing Upward, Line 4

The fourth line of Pushing Upward (King Wen 46) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the king employing him to present offerings on Mount Qi, good fortune, no error. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns great progress and success, seeking to meet the great man need cause no anxiety, advance to the south 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 lowest place of the upper trigram Kun, earth in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Xun, wind in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads wood in the midst of the earth, growing; the superior man pays careful attention to his virtue and accumulates its small increases until it is high and great, and the fourth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Kun above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Kun is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The King Employing Him to Present Offerings, 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 fourth place of Pushing Upward reads within the hexagram's overall concern with great progress and success, seeking to meet the great man need cause no anxiety, advance to the south brings good fortune. 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 the king employing him to present offerings on Mount Qi, good fortune, no error, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The fourth line corresponds by classical convention with the first line, and the two do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Kun in the upper position of the figure, the line marks the first word of the upper trigram, close enough to the ruling fifth line to be shaped by it, 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 fourth line of Pushing Upward turns Kun into Zhen while the other trigram, Xun, stays as it is, which yields Pushing Upward's changing partner, Duration (King Wen 32), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.