The Well, Line 6

The sixth line of The Well (King Wen 48) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as waters drawn from the well without being covered over, a nature of sincerity that brings great good fortune. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns a town may be changed while the fashion of its wells is never changed, the well neither decreasing nor increasing, and all who come and go draw from it and are benefited, 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 upper trigram Kan, water 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 water above wood; the superior man comforts the people and stimulates them to help one another, and the sixth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Kan above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Kan is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Waters Drawn from the Well Uncovered, 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 sixth place of The Well reads within the hexagram's overall concern with a town may be changed while the fashion of its wells is never changed, the well neither decreasing nor increasing, and all who come and go draw from it and are benefited. 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 waters drawn from the well without being covered over, a nature of sincerity that brings great good fortune, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The sixth line corresponds by classical convention with the third line, and the two correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Kan in the upper position of the figure, the line marks the far edge of the hexagram, past the point the ruling fifth line governs, 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 sixth line of The Well turns Kan into Xun while the other trigram, Xun, stays as it is, which yields The Well's changing partner, The Gentle (King Wen 57), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.