Yin and yang lines

Yin and yang lines are the divided and undivided strokes that compose the Yijing’s six-line figures, but their force is not reducible to a simple opposition between weakness and strength. The translator describes a system in which line quality, position, correspondence, and the meaning of the whole hexagram interact: a line’s significance changes with its structural setting, while the figure supplies the context for interpreting it. This account also insists on a historical distinction: the lines signify changing phenomena and human circumstances in the text, not necessarily a fully developed cosmology of primal yin and yang substance.

The divided and undivided structure

A hexagram consists of six lines, some whole and some divided. The translator describes the whole line as bright and the divided line as dark, and associates yang with strength or hardness and yin with weakness or softness. In the account of their conventional functions, the strong lines indicate vigour and authority, while the weak lines indicate feebleness and submission: the former command and the latter obey. These associations establish an interpretive vocabulary, but they do not by themselves settle what any one line means in a particular figure.

The form of a hexagram makes placement part of meaning. Its six lines are read as two trigrams, and the positions within that structure determine how the lines affect and qualify one another. The first, third, and fifth places are conventionally correct for whole lines; the second, fourth, and sixth are conventionally correct for divided lines. The rules therefore ask not only what kind of line appears, but whether its quality suits the place it occupies.

The same structural approach explains why the figure’s composition can matter to an interpretation. In Small Excess, for example, two whole lines occupy the third and fourth places, while divided lines predominate around them. The commentary connects this arrangement to the name’s sense of small excess or exceeding in small matters. It treats the pattern not as self-sufficient geometry, but as a structure whose relevance becomes intelligible when read alongside the hexagram’s subject and practical teaching.

Position, correspondence, and interpretation

Lines are also interpreted through their relations to lines in the other trigram. The first and fourth, second and fifth, and third and sixth positions form corresponding pairs. For a correspondence to be complete, the two lines should be of different qualities: one whole and one divided. The middle positions, the second and fifth, carry particular force. If they contain opposite line qualities, their correlation is complete; the commentary illustrates the political potential of this relation by describing the fifth-position subject as a sovereign or commander and the second-position subject as an able minister or officer. Their mutual action can then be beneficial and successful.

These rules make the hexagram’s name essential to reading its lines. A positional pattern does not have a single meaning that can be transferred unchanged from figure to figure; the same line quality may signify different things according to the subject or state represented by the hexagram. Interpretation thus moves between the parts and the whole: the lines contribute to the figure’s combined significance, while the figure’s theme determines how a line’s position and quality should be understood.

The translator presents this procedure as a way of approaching the reasoning behind the text, not as a license to impose any desired meaning on it. He describes the hexagram interpretations as symbolic essays and the line interpretations as emblematic illustrations, with assessments of whether action in the represented circumstances will be fortunate or unfortunate. In his account, the whole-figure interpretation and the combined meanings of its six lines should agree. The structure is therefore both a formal arrangement and a constraint on interpretation.

From symbolic form to the author’s thought

The translator’s own method of translation follows a related movement between visible form and inferred meaning. He recalls that his first version, made in 1854, tried to preserve the original’s concision and consequently produced English with little syntactical connection. He later concluded that a literal rendering could not overcome the difficulty: written Chinese characters, in his account, are symbols of ideas rather than representations of words, and their combination reflects what the writer thinks rather than simply reproducing what the writer would say.

His proposed alternative is to let the symbols bring the translator’s mind into relation with the author’s thought, then express that thought as accurately and concisely as possible in English. At times, this requires supplying a word that the original’s thought leaves implicit. He says such additions are generally marked by parentheses, though he questions whether the marks are always necessary, since he believes the supplied ideas were present in the writer’s thought. This method makes interpretation unavoidable while setting a limit on it: the translator may clarify what is implicit, but should not treat symbolic writing as permission to depart from the original’s meaning.

Applied to the line figures, the method helps explain why form cannot be separated from interpretation. Position, line quality, correspondence, and hexagram subject operate together, just as a translation must connect written symbols to the thought they convey. Yet the interpretive result remains the translator’s reconstruction of the text’s logic; it should not be mistaken for an uncontested statement by the ancient authors about how the figures originated or what every line meant.

Historical limits on cosmological readings

The translator distinguishes the text’s changing symbolic phenomena from later claims about a primary substance called yin and yang. He reports that Chinese commentators and several foreign scholars assumed such a doctrine was already present in the Yijing, but argues that he could find no proof for that reading. In his chronology, the idea of a primary matter took more than a thousand years after the Yijing’s completion to develop within the Confucian school, becoming fully formed in the era of the Song dynasty, particularly the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

He accordingly warns against reading that later theory backward into the earlier work. In his view, the author under discussion was concerned with the Yijing as a record of ever-changing natural phenomena and human experience, not with creation or cosmogony. The distinction matters for the lines: their oppositions and interactions can organize interpretations without requiring them to be treated as manifestations of an all-encompassing primordial substance.

The commentary on Pleasure offers a specific example of the difference between a structural explanation and a cosmological one. The trigram is associated with water collected in a marsh or lake and with pleasure or complacent satisfaction. The editors’ explanation links rising and descending moisture in spring to the visible expression of a person’s health; it then warns that mildness and harmony without true-heartedness and integrity may degenerate into evil. The translator finds the connection between marsh and pleasure difficult to determine, but emphasizes the practical conclusion: pleasure needs firmness and correctness to direct it. The soft lines contribute to the figure’s character, yet their effect depends on the strength that supports and governs them.

Sincerity and the limits of the line pattern

The hexagram Sincere Inner Trust presents a different use of line structure. Its central pair of divided lines is interpreted as a heart or mind free from preoccupation and self-consciousness. The whole lines above and below are taken to represent the solidity of the virtue that accompanies such freedom from selfishness. The image makes the pattern ethically legible: divided and undivided lines contribute to an account of inward sincerity, rather than functioning only as abstract markers of weakness and strength.

The commentary associates this sincerity with influence over spiritual beings, other people, and even lower creatures, and says that the text presents its possessor as able to succeed in difficult enterprises. Yet it also stresses the need for firmness and correctness. The translator notes a disagreement over how to interpret the first line’s relation to the fourth: the ordinary account treats them as correlates, whereas the editors cited in the commentary set aside the usual force of correspondence in most of this hexagram, except for the third and sixth lines. Their reason is that sincerity is centered in itself and derives its power from within. The exception shows that correspondence is an interpretive rule, not an automatic key; a hexagram’s stated subject can require the reader to limit or revise its application.

Taken together, these examples show why the divided and undivided lines cannot be read as a fixed code with one meaning per stroke. Their significance arises from the interaction of quality and place, relation and exception, and the practical or ethical subject of the figure. The translator’s historical caution adds another boundary: structural interpretation may disclose a text’s account of change and experience without proving that it contains the later metaphysics imposed upon it.