Youthful Folly, Line 3

The third line turns to a warning framed as marriage counsel. Legge's rendering advises against marrying a woman whose emblem this line might be, since on seeing a man of wealth she will not keep her person from him. Read within the hexagram's larger theme of youthful folly, the image describes attention drawn helplessly toward whatever glitters nearest, a lack of proper direction rather than a judgment on any particular person.

The line occupies the topmost place of the lower trigram Kan, the last position before the hexagram crosses into its upper half, and Chinese commentary consistently reads such hinge lines as unstable, belonging fully to neither the trigram beneath nor the one above. Folly at this threshold shows itself not as simple lack of knowledge but as a failure of proper commitment, attention that shifts toward whatever advantage appears nearest rather than holding to what has already been rightly chosen.

Commentary tradition reads this line as counsel against forming an alliance, of any kind, with a party whose loyalty bends easily toward passing advantage. The warning is general even though its image is specific: folly untaught by the earlier lines' correction and forbearance can still express itself here as an inconstancy that undermines whatever partnership or commitment it touches, wealth or novelty proving stronger than any prior bond.

Six in the third place is read divinatorially as a warning against forming a commitment with a party whose attention shifts too easily toward passing advantage. A querent whose reading lands here should examine whether a proposed alliance, partnership, or relationship rests on genuine constancy or merely on convenience, since the line's image, attention drawn helplessly toward wealth or novelty, describes a loyalty that will not hold once something more attractive appears.

Structurally the third line is the last of the lower trigram before the hexagram crosses into its upper half, and commentary tradition treats such hinge positions as the most exposed in any hexagram, belonging fully to neither what lies beneath nor what comes after. A reading falling here often marks a genuine decision point about whom to trust or commit to, at a moment when the querent's own judgment is still forming and therefore especially vulnerable to being misled by surface appeal.

Divinatory tradition reads the line's counsel as caution rather than condemnation: the fault named is inconstancy, not any single failing, and the querent is advised to look past immediate attraction toward whether a prospective match, business or personal, has shown steadiness under circumstances less flattering than the present one. A changing line here favors delay over commitment until that steadiness is genuinely proven.