The Marrying Maiden, Line 4

The fourth line of The Marrying Maiden (King Wen 54) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the time protracted, married later than expected, but the time will come. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns action taken now will be evil, in no way advantageous, 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 Zhen, thunder 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 thunder over the waters of a marsh; the superior man, with regard to the far distant end, knows the mischief that may be done at the beginning, and the fourth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Dui below and Zhen above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Zhen is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Time Protracted, 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 fourth place of The Marrying Maiden reads within the hexagram's overall concern with action taken now will be evil, in no way advantageous. 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. Its own text, that the time protracted, married later than expected, but the time will come, 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, Zhen 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 yang to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the fourth line of The Marrying Maiden turns Zhen into Kun while the other trigram, Dui, stays as it is, which yields The Marrying Maiden's changing partner, Approach (King Wen 19), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.