Pushing Upward, Line 5

The fifth line of Pushing Upward (King Wen 46) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as firm correctness brings good fortune, ascending the steps in due order. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns great progress and success, seeking to meet the great man need cause no anxiety, advance to the south brings good fortune, 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 Kun, earth 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 wood in the midst of the earth, growing; the superior man pays careful attention to his virtue and accumulates its small increases until it is high and great, and the fifth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Kun above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Kun is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Firm Correctness Brings Good Fortune, 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, six at the fifth place of Pushing Upward reads within the hexagram's overall concern with great progress and success, seeking to meet the great man need cause no anxiety, advance to the south brings good fortune. 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. 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 firm correctness brings good fortune, ascending the steps in due order, 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 correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Kun 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 yin to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the fifth line of Pushing Upward turns Kun into Kan while the other trigram, Xun, stays as it is, which yields Pushing Upward's changing partner, The Well (King Wen 48), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.