Revolution, Line 3

The third line of Revolution (King Wen 49) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as action taken now would be evil, and though firm and correct the position is perilous, but once the change has been debated three times over, he will be believed in. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns believed in only once it is accomplished, great progress and success, advantage in being firm and correct, so that any occasion for repentance disappears, 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 Li, fire in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Dui, lake in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads fire in the midst of the waters of a marsh; the superior man regulates his calendar and makes clear the seasons and times, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Li below and Dui above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Li is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Action Taken Now Would Be Evil, 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, nine at the third place of Revolution reads within the hexagram's overall concern with believed in only once it is accomplished, great progress and success, advantage in being firm and correct, so that any occasion for repentance disappears. 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 action taken now would be evil, and though firm and correct the position is perilous, but once the change has been debated three times over, he will be believed in, 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 correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Li 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 yang to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the third line of Revolution turns Li into Zhen while the other trigram, Dui, stays as it is, which yields Revolution's changing partner, Following (King Wen 17), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.