Treading, Line 6

Legge's translation of the sixth and topmost line reads that it tells us to look at the whole course that has been trodden and to examine the presage it gives, so that if the course is found complete and without failure, great good fortune follows. Unlike every earlier line, this one asks for no new action at all, only a retrospective look back across everything the hexagram's five preceding lines have already done.

Nine at the top closes Qian, the upper trigram, at its highest place, with no line above it to answer to, and the whole of Treading's theme, walking safely near a tiger's tail without being bitten, is gathered here into a single final judgment. The line does not repeat the danger of the third line or the caution of the fourth; it steps outside the sequence of individual risks to ask whether the entire path, taken together, has actually held.

Legge's conditional phrasing, great good fortune only if the course proves complete and without failure, marks this as the hexagram's summary rather than its conclusion in the ordinary sense. The topmost line's verdict depends entirely on what the other five lines have already shown, a final accounting rather than a new event.

The retrospective form of this line is itself unusual among the six: every other line describes an action taken or a danger met in the course of walking, while this one steps back to weigh the whole walk only once it is finished, closer to a verdict than to a further step.

Nine at the top, as a changing line, reads as a final accounting rather than a fresh test. A querent shown this line is asked to look back across the whole course already trodden, the accustomed path, the quiet solitude, the tiger's bite, the apprehensive caution, the resolute peril, and to judge whether that course, taken as a whole, has actually held complete and without failure. Great good fortune is promised, but only on that condition.

Flipping this line changes the upper trigram from Qian to Dui, Lake, giving Dui over Dui, the hexagram called The Joyous. The retrospective weighing of a course just completed becomes, on the far side of change, a hexagram built entirely from open, mutual joy, two lakes reinforcing each other rather than one trigram standing beneath another in careful, cautious relation. The movement is from vigilance finally set down to a lighter, shared contentment, as though the whole danger Treading described was only ever a passage through to this doubled ease.

As the final line of Treading's arc, this position is where the entire hexagram's meaning is weighed rather than added to, whether careful conduct near overwhelming strength has, in the end, actually succeeded. A reading falling here suggests that the matter is now complete enough to judge, and that the transformation into shared joy is available precisely because the course behind it held.