The Joyous, Line 5

The fifth line of The Joyous (King Wen 58) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as trusting in one who would do him injury, a perilous situation, though his place is the one correct and appropriate to him. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress and attainment, but advantage lies in being firm and correct, 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 upper trigram Dui, lake in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Dui, lake in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads two joined marshes, one above the other; the superior man encourages friends in conversation and in the practice they share, and the fifth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Dui below and Dui 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, Trusting in One Who Would Injure Him, 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 fifth place of The Joyous reads within the hexagram's overall concern with progress and attainment, but advantage lies in being firm and correct. 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. 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 trusting in one who would do him injury, a perilous situation, though his place is the one correct and appropriate to him, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The fifth line corresponds by classical convention with the second 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 upper position of the figure, the line marks the ruling stage of the hexagram, the place classical reading treats as its centre of authority, 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 fifth line of The Joyous turns Dui into Zhen while the other trigram, Dui, stays as it is, which yields The Joyous's changing partner, The Marrying Maiden (King Wen 54), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.