The Wanderer, Line 6

The sixth line of The Wanderer (King Wen 56) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as a bird's nest burned, the wanderer laughing at first and later crying out, losing his ox in the field of Yi, an evil case. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns some small attainment and progress for the stranger who is firm and correct as he travels, 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 Li, fire in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Gen, mountain in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads fire above a mountain; the superior man uses wisdom and caution in punishments, and does not let litigation drag on, and the sixth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Gen below and Li above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Li is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Bird's Nest Burned, 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, nine at the sixth place of The Wanderer reads within the hexagram's overall concern with some small attainment and progress for the stranger who is firm and correct as he travels. 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 a bird's nest burned, the wanderer laughing at first and later crying out, losing his ox in the field of Yi, an evil case, 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, Li 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 yang to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the sixth line of The Wanderer turns Li into Zhen while the other trigram, Gen, stays as it is, which yields The Wanderer's changing partner, Small Preponderance (King Wen 62), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.