The Clinging, Line 3

The third line stands at the top of the lower trigram, where the first of the hexagram's two fires has finished burning, and the text gives it the image of the setting sun. Legge's translation offers a choice between two responses. The subject might beat on his instrument of earthenware and sing to it; instead he utters the groans of an old man of eighty, and the outcome is evil. The commentary asks only how a position like that of the declining sun could be expected to continue long.

The pairing of vessel and lament carries the substance of the line. An earthen drum is the plainest instrument there is, and singing over it is what a person does who has accepted the hour they are in. The alternative offered is not resistance but complaint, and the classic is precise that the misfortune attaches to the complaint rather than to the setting. The sun goes down in either case.

The stroke is strong in an odd place, correct by the ordinary rule, and it has moved past the centre of its trigram. Correctness of position protects nothing at a turning point, because what defines the third line is not its own quality but its location at the join where one brightness ends and the next has not yet caught. In a doubled figure of fire, the moment between the two flames is where a person finds out what they do about endings.

Nine in the third place is one of the classic's clearest statements that an outcome can be settled by an attitude. The situation described is not itself a misfortune. It is the sun in decline, an ordinary and unavoidable stage, and the evil the text names follows from the response to it, from choosing the groan over the song. A querent drawing this line is being told that the ending is not the problem they are actually facing.

The practical range is wide because the image is structural rather than particular. A project past its best hour, an office about to be handed on, a stage of life closing on schedule: any of them fits. What the line asks is whether the person can mark the close with something plain and adequate, the earthen vessel and the song over it, instead of treating a natural decline as an injury done to them. The commentary's question about how long such a position can last is not cruelty, only a reminder that the answer was never in doubt.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Li becomes Zhen and the figure becomes Biting Through, King Wen 21, in which an obstruction between the jaws is bitten apart and penal law is applied. Read from a line about refusing an ending, that destination names the alternative honestly. What is not released willingly has eventually to be broken through, and the breaking is harsher than the acceptance would have been.