A Pig Covered in Mud, a Cart Full of Ghosts, and a Bow Unbent

The topmost line is the hexagram's account of how estrangement ends, and it ends as a misperception corrected. Legge's translation shows the subject solitary amid the disunion, seeing a pig bearing a load of mud on its back and a carriage full of ghosts, bending his bow against what is approaching and then unbending it, because what comes is not an assailant but a near relative seeking a marriage connection. Going forward he meets rain, and there is good fortune.

The sequence is the whole line. First the approaching figure is repellent, then it is uncanny, then it is armed against, then the weapon is lowered, and only at the end is it correctly identified. The classic does not say the other party changed. It says the bow was unbent, which places the entire transformation in the person who was holding it, and that is the most direct statement anywhere in the figure about what disunion actually consists of.

This stroke is strong in an even seat at the very top of the upper trigram Li, incorrectly placed and as far from the rest of the hexagram as a line can stand. Its proper correlate is the third line, the one dragged back and punished, which is exactly the figure it has been seeing as a pig fouled with mud. The good end promised to the third line and the good fortune given here are one event described from the two ends of a single correspondence, and the rain that falls is the classic's standing image for a tension between two forces finally discharging.