Treading, Line 4

Legge gives the fourth line as the fourth nine, undivided, showing its subject treading on the tail of a tiger, becoming full of apprehensive caution, so that in the end there is good fortune. This line steps onto the same ground the third line occupied, direct contact with the tiger's tail, yet reaches a wholly different outcome because of the caution its subject brings to the act.

Nine in the fourth place opens Qian, the upper trigram, directly above the boundary where the third line was bitten, and the line's good fortune depends entirely on the apprehension it feels rather than on any greater strength it possesses. Where the third line's subject overestimated their own capacity, the fourth line's subject treads the identical danger honestly aware of it, and that awareness, rather than removing the risk, is what allows the risk to be survived.

Legge's phrasing is deliberate in placing the caution before the good fortune, as if the sequence itself were the lesson, fear rightly felt at the moment of real danger is not weakness but the very thing that makes treading near the tiger survivable, in sharp contrast to the misjudged confidence the line immediately before it showed failing.

Nine in the fourth place, as a changing line, describes danger survived through honest apprehension rather than misplaced confidence. A querent shown this line treads the same ground the third line trod, direct contact with the tiger's tail, yet the outcome promised is good fortune, because the caution felt here is exactly what the third line's subject lacked. The lesson is not to avoid the danger but to feel it accurately while meeting it.

Flipping this line changes the upper trigram from Qian to Xun, Wind, giving Xun over Dui, the hexagram called Inner Truth. The apprehensive caution that carries this line safely past the tiger becomes, on the far side of change, the hexagram most associated with unforced sincerity reaching even the least approachable creatures. The movement suggests that caution honestly felt and acted on is already a form of the trust Inner Truth describes, a fear that, rightly held, does not curdle into either recklessness or paralysis.

Within Treading's arc, the fourth line is the first position in the upper trigram, the point where the hexagram's central danger must be faced again, this time with the benefit of the third line's example already behind it. A reading landing here suggests that present caution, however uncomfortable, is precisely the quality that will carry the matter through to good fortune rather than repeating the previous line's harm.