Line positions and correspondence

Line positions and correspondence is the interpretive system by which a line’s place, quality, and relation to other lines shape its meaning within a hexagram. It turns the six-line figure into a structured reading rather than a set of interchangeable signs: position can make a line appropriate or misplaced, paired lines may support or endanger one another, and central lines can carry special force. In the book’s examples, these relationships help explain why the same formal qualities yield different practical counsel in different hexagrams.

The Structure of a Reading

The system begins from the six places in the hexagram and the distinction between whole and divided lines. Its broader rules associate particular places with strength or weakness, but position alone does not settle the interpretation. The lines are also paired across the two trigrams: the first corresponds with the fourth, the second with the fifth, and the third with the sixth. A correspondence is considered complete when the paired lines have different qualities, one whole and one divided. The second and fifth places are especially significant because they are the central places of their respective trigrams; when their qualities differ, their relation is complete.

These formal patterns acquire practical meaning through the subject of the hexagram. The fifth line may represent a sovereign or commander, while the second can represent a capable minister or officer, and their mutual action may be beneficial. But the same place-and-line pattern cannot be interpreted without regard to what the hexagram names or describes. The book stresses that the significance of every line varies with the subject or state represented by the whole figure. Position and correspondence are therefore rules of interpretation, not a mechanical code that produces one fixed meaning in every context.

Position, Quality, and Consequence

The commentary on Tui shows how a line’s place can create a risk that its other qualities partly counteract. The second line is strong where weakness would be appropriate and has no proper correlate; because it is contiguous to the weak third line, its subject might be injured. Yet the line is central, and the sincerity associated with that central position offsets the danger and prevents the threatened cause for repentance from becoming decisive. The reading depends on holding the mismatch, proximity, and centrality together rather than treating any one of them as sufficient.

The fourth line in the same hexagram illustrates a different effect of adjacency. Its proximity to the weak third line could expose it to an injurious influence. Instead, its subject reflects and deliberates before yielding to the attraction of pleasure, so the danger of that neighboring line is met with judgment. The relationship marks a susceptibility; the line’s described response determines whether that susceptibility governs the outcome.

The fifth line in Tui faces a further danger from the weak sixth line above, in whom it is represented as trusting. The commentary leaves the result conditional: the fifth line’s strength and sincerity might be turned toward evil, or they might operate beneficially. Here correspondence and proximity do not deliver a simple verdict. They identify a pressure on the line, while leaving the moral direction of its strength open.

Relations Across Different Hexagrams

In Hwân, the opening line is weak and in an odd place, while the evil confronting it has not yet made great progress. The danger is still manageable, but the line’s subject cannot overcome it alone; help comes through a strong horse, understood as a symbol for the subject of the strong second line. The lines’ relation thus supplies a model of aid: weakness at the outset is not enough to defeat the work, provided the subject joins with a stronger counterpart.

The second line of Hwân presents the converse difficulty. It is strong in an even place and centrally situated, but it belongs to the lower trigram Khan, associated here with peril. Action is dangerous, and the subject looks downward to the first line and takes shelter in union with it. The account, attributed to the interpretation established since Khăng-ȝze, makes the line’s course intelligible through both its compromised placement and its chosen association.

In Kieh, the relation between lines helps explain conduct under a system of government regulations. The first line is strong and correctly placed, so its subject has the capacity to make progress; nevertheless, the strong second line checks it, and its correlate, the fourth line, belongs to the trigram of peril. In those circumstances, restraint is the wiser course. The commentary makes this concrete through the image of the inner door, distinguished from the outer gate: the point is not simply that the subject lacks power, but that a capable officer should not take office rashly or act without cautious judgment.

Other Kieh lines show that the relation between formal position and conduct can produce contrasting failures and successes. The second line is strong in the wrong place, lacks a proper correlate, and keeps still when it should act; the third is weak where it should be strong, neither central nor correct, and refuses the discipline of regulations until it is too late. Against these failures, the fourth line is weak as appropriate and respects the authority of the strong ruler in the fifth, giving its position a favorable interpretation. The fifth, strong and correctly placed, regulates itself despite having no correlate; as lord of the hexagram, its influence benefits the whole. The sixth is weak in its proper place, but its subject’s exaggerated desire to impose rules makes them too severe and brings an evil effect. Correct placement matters, but it does not excuse excess; the commentary also allows that the mistake can be remedied and regret removed.

Conditions, Change, and Interpretive Limits

Kî Ȝî offers the clearest case in which the lines’ arrangement supports the hexagram’s general promise. Every line is in its correct place and has its proper correlate, a pattern the commentary says harmonizes with progress and success. Yet completion does not mean that further action is immediately desirable. The kingdom has crossed a great and dangerous stream and its disorders have been suppressed, but the new government still needs consolidation. The ruler must continue quietly, with firmness and correctness, mindful that human affairs remain unstable.

The first line translates that political caution into an image of restraint just after success: a driver tries to stop the carriage, while a fox that has wet its tail does not tempt the stream again. The second line is weak in its proper place and has a strong correlate in the fifth, which might seem to encourage action. Its central position instead counsels withdrawal for a time. The image is of a lady whose carriage has lost its screen: she does not press forward immediately after success, and the commentary explains the promised return of the screen after seven days as the completion of the Kî Ȝî period, after which a new period makes action proper. Proper correspondence supports the reading, but timing governs what that relation advises.

The method belongs to a broader account of how the text should be read. Its figures do not explain their own origins, and the book’s account of their interpretation treats the whole hexagram and its lines as mutually illuminating: the ruler’s interpretation of the figure is said to accord with the combined significance of its six lines. At the same time, the translator warns against expecting a literal or universal key. Chinese written characters, in his account, are symbols of ideas rather than representations of words, so the translator must seek the author’s thought and express it intelligibly without claiming interpretive license. He also rejects the later attempt to read a fully developed doctrine of primary matter into the Great Treatise, arguing that its subject is the changing phenomena of nature and experience, not a cosmogony. Line positions and correspondence thus provide disciplined clues within a larger act of contextual interpretation: they constrain a reading, while the hexagram’s subject, the surrounding lines, and the circumstances determine what the clues mean.