Coming to Meet, Line 5

The fifth line of Coming to Meet (King Wen 44) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as a medlar tree overspreading a melon beneath it, and if he keeps his brilliant qualities concealed a good issue descends as if from heaven. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns a bold, strong female met unexpectedly; not good to marry such a one, since she should not be long associated with, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the middle place of the upper trigram Qian, heaven 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 wind beneath heaven; the sovereign delivers his charges and announcements to the four quarters, and the fifth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Qian above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Qian is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Medlar Tree Overspreading a Melon Beneath It, 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 fifth place of Coming to Meet reads within the hexagram's overall concern with a bold, strong female met unexpectedly; not good to marry such a one, since she should not be long associated with. 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. It is also one of the two central lines of the hexagram, the place classical reading treats as the most balanced regardless of the line's own character. Its own text, that a medlar tree overspreading a melon beneath it, and if he keeps his brilliant qualities concealed a good issue descends as if from heaven, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The fifth line corresponds by classical convention with the second line, and the two do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Qian in the upper position of the figure, the line marks the ruling stage of the hexagram, the place classical reading treats as its centre of authority, 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 fifth line of Coming to Meet turns Qian into Li while the other trigram, Xun, stays as it is, which yields Coming to Meet's changing partner, The Cauldron (King Wen 50), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.