The Joyous, Line 6

The sixth line of The Joyous (King Wen 58) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as pleasure found in leading and attracting others, though his own light is not yet brilliant. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress and attainment, but advantage lies in being firm and correct, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the topmost place of the upper trigram Dui, lake in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Dui, lake in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads two joined marshes, one above the other; the superior man encourages friends in conversation and in the practice they share, and the sixth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Dui 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 Pleasure Found in Leading and Attracting Others, 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 sixth place of The Joyous reads within the hexagram's overall concern with progress and attainment, but advantage lies in being firm and correct. 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. Its own text, that pleasure found in leading and attracting others, though his own light is not yet brilliant, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The sixth line corresponds by classical convention with the third line, and the two do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Dui in the upper position of the figure, the line marks the far edge of the hexagram, past the point the ruling fifth line governs, 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 sixth line of The Joyous turns Dui into Qian while the other trigram, Dui, stays as it is, which yields The Joyous's changing partner, Treading (King Wen 10), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.