Three Men Walking Together

“Three Men Walking Together” names a line image in which a group is reduced by one and a person walking alone finds a friend. The image turns a change in number into a change in relation, but its explanation remains unsettled: the translator reports a technical account of the line pattern and says he cannot discern a rational thread in it. Together, the terse line and the doubtful commentary show how the text’s symbolic figures invite interpretation without guaranteeing that every interpretation will persuade.

The Image in the Line

The third line, divided, says that “of three men walking together, the number is diminished by one; and how one, walking, finds his friend.” Its two movements are paired: one is removed from a group, and a person apart from the group meets a companion. The text does not identify the walkers or describe a journey; its force lies in the shift from three to two, followed by the solitary walker’s encounter. The line presents these as symbolic events rather than supplying a literal narrative of who leaves or who meets whom.

The Commentary’s Attempted Explanation

The translator finds the third paragraph obscure and recounts Zhu Xi’s proposed account. On this reading, the lower trigram was originally made of three undivided lines, corresponding to the three men. The third line was then taken away and made the topmost line of what had been a trigram of three divided lines: this transfer represents putting one man away. A further change of place between the third and sixth lines, while preserving their proper correspondence, is taken to represent one person going away and finding a friend. The explanation tries to account for both halves of the image through changes in the figure, but the translator says he can find no thread of reason in it.

Line Meaning and Interpretive Limits

The difficulty matters because the book’s line texts are not treated as isolated labels. The account of the hexagrams describes each line’s significance as dependent on the name of the hexagram and the state it denotes; the same line can therefore have different applications in different figures. Here the translator gives the image and then exposes the strain involved in connecting it to a formal rearrangement of lines. Rather than smoothing over that strain, he distinguishes the wording of the line from the later explanation offered for it.

The translator’s broader account of translation clarifies why he seeks meaning beyond a word-for-word rendering. He argues that Chinese characters function as symbols of ideas and that their combinations express what a writer thinks, not simply a sequence of words to be reproduced literally. Translation, on this account, requires the translator to enter into the author’s thought and render its sense intelligibly, while remaining as exact and concise as possible. Yet that interpretive freedom does not turn every symbolic account into a convincing one: his judgment that the explanation of the three walkers is obscure preserves the gap between the line’s memorable image and the commentary’s uncertain reasoning.