The Clinging, Line 4

The fourth line opens the second fire and does it violently. Legge's translation exclaims at the manner of the subject's coming, how abrupt it is, with fire, with death, and with being cast aside. The commentary on the image supplies the reason in a few words: none can bear with him. Where the hexagram's other lines describe brightness that attaches to something and therefore lasts, this one describes brightness that arrives all at once and is finished by its own arrival.

The image is a sequence rather than a single picture. Something flares, it consumes what it was burning, and what remains of it is discarded. A doubled Li figure would ordinarily read the passage from the lower trigram to the upper as the light being handed on, and the fourth line is where that handover happens. The text shows it botched, with the second flame taking hold in a way that leaves nothing underneath for it to stand on.

The stroke is strong in an even seat, incorrect by the ordinary rule, and it sits directly beneath the yielding ruler of the upper trigram. Excess force in a place that calls for yielding is the structural fact behind every part of the image. Fire needs fuel and a person needs a position others will tolerate, and a line carrying more strength than its seat can hold destroys both at the moment it appears.

Nine in the fourth place is a warning about entrances. A querent drawing it should examine how something is being introduced rather than whether it is right, because the line does not dispute the substance of what arrives. It reports that the manner of the arrival makes the thing impossible to accommodate. Fire, death and rejection are stacked into a single clause, and the commentary reduces the whole matter to the observation that nobody can put up with the subject.

The reading applies as readily to a person entering a settled group as to a proposal dropped into an organisation with no preparation. In both cases the energy is genuine and the reception is fatal to it. What the hexagram values throughout is light that has found something firm to cling to, and what this line shows is light with nothing under it at all, spending itself in the instant of appearing.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Li becomes Gen and the figure becomes Grace, King Wen 22, in which mountain holds fire and form is given to what would otherwise merely blaze. The remedy is named by the destination rather than by the line itself. Stillness above brightness is the arrangement in which a flame is shaped and shown to advantage, and it is the exact correction of an entrance made with no form at all.