The Marrying Maiden, Line 3

The third line of The Marrying Maiden (King Wen 54) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the younger sister in a mean position waiting to be married, returning instead to accept a secondary place. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns action taken now will be evil, in no way advantageous, 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 lower trigram Dui, lake in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Zhen, thunder in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads thunder over the waters of a marsh; the superior man, with regard to the far distant end, knows the mischief that may be done at the beginning, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Dui below and Zhen 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, Waiting in a Mean Position to Be Married, 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 third place of The Marrying Maiden reads within the hexagram's overall concern with action taken now will be evil, in no way advantageous. 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 the younger sister in a mean position waiting to be married, returning instead to accept a secondary place, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The third line corresponds by classical convention with the sixth 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 lower position of the figure, the line marks the hinge between the two trigrams, the last word the lower trigram gets before the upper trigram takes over, 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 third line of The Marrying Maiden turns Dui into Qian while the other trigram, Zhen, stays as it is, which yields The Marrying Maiden's changing partner, Great Power (King Wen 34), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.