The Cauldron, Line 2

The second line of The Cauldron (King Wen 50) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the caldron filled, but the one who bears him ill will cannot approach him, and there is good fortune. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns great progress and success, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the middle place of the lower trigram Xun, wind in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Li, fire in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads wood entering into fire, the image of cooking; the superior man keeps every position correct and makes secure the appointment received from heaven, and the second line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Li above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Xun is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Caldron Filled, 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 second place of The Cauldron reads within the hexagram's overall concern with great progress and success. 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. It is also one of the two central lines of the hexagram, the place classical reading treats as the most balanced regardless of the line's own character. Its own text, that the caldron filled, but the one who bears him ill will cannot approach him, and there is good fortune, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The second line corresponds by classical convention with the fifth line, and the two correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Xun in the lower position of the figure, the line marks the situation settling into its own character, still wholly inside the lower trigram, 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 second line of The Cauldron turns Xun into Gen while the other trigram, Li, stays as it is, which yields The Cauldron's changing partner, The Wanderer (King Wen 56), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.