Gathering Together, Line 4

The fourth line of Gathering Together (King Wen 45) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as great good fortune and no error, though his position is not the one that properly belongs to him. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns union and being collected, docile obedience leading on to satisfaction; the king approaches his temple, and firm correctness brings advantage, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the lowest place of the upper trigram Dui, lake in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Kun, earth in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads a marsh raised above the earth; the superior man keeps his weapons of war in good repair against contingencies not yet foreseen, and the fourth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Kun below and Dui above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Dui is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Great Good Fortune and No Error, 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 fourth place of Gathering Together reads within the hexagram's overall concern with union and being collected, docile obedience leading on to satisfaction; the king approaches his temple, and firm correctness brings advantage. The line occupies a place that does not match 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 great good fortune and no error, though his position is not the one that properly belongs to him, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The fourth line corresponds by classical convention with the first line, and the two correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Dui in the upper position of the figure, the line marks the first word of the upper trigram, close enough to the ruling fifth line to be shaped by it, 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 fourth line of Gathering Together turns Dui into Kan while the other trigram, Kun, stays as it is, which yields Gathering Together's changing partner, Holding Together (King Wen 8), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.