Line positions: Initial to Top

Six places, counted from the bottom

A hexagram has six lines, and each place has its own name. The lowest is called Initial, the next ones second, third, fourth and fifth, and the highest is called Top.

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Place sketch: counted from the bottom, Initial is place 1 and Top is place 6. A table of places, not of fortunes.

The lower three places form the lower trigram, also called the inner trigram, and the upper three form the upper (outer) trigram; places two and five are the middle stroke of each. How two trigrams stack into sixty-four hexagrams is covered in The Sixty-Four Hexagrams: How Upper and Lower Trigrams Form One Figure. The phrase "six places" is already in the Commentary on the Judgments (彖传) for Qian (乾): "the great brightness of end and beginning, the six places complete in their times".

Why is the bottom line not "one" and the top line not "six"? Kong Yingda, a Tang-dynasty commentator, answers in his subcommentary on Initial Nine of Qian. He cites Zhuang's view that if the bottom is "initial", the top carries a sense of "end"; he adds that the Images (象传) say "yang is below", so "initial" also means "below"; then he gives a reason for each name:

The first place is called "initial" because it shows things building up gradually, from nothing into something; so it says initial rather than one or below. The sixth is called "top" because it shows a place at the top of the hexagram; so it says top rather than six or end.

Nine and Six: how a line name is built

A line name has two parts: a place, and a number for the kind of line. A yang line is written Nine and a yin line Six, so the second place holds either Nine in the second place or Six in the second place. The table below uses Qian and Xu (需).

Two things are worth noticing:

• The words Initial and Top come before the number (Initial Nine, Top Six), while places two to five put the number first (Nine in the second place, Six in the fourth).
• The number only records whether the line is yang or yin, so Xu carries Six just in the fourth and top places.

Qian also has a seventh text after Top Nine, "using Nine" (用九), a separate statement covered in Judgment and Line Statements: Whole Hexagram or Single Line?.

Why Nine for yang and Six for yin? The Zhou Yi Zhengyi lists two accounts:

After these two accounts Kong cites a further view from Zhang and closes the discussion with "perhaps so", so these are traditional explanations, not anything the line statements say. How casting methods differ is compared in Yijing, Meihua and Liu Yao: Shared Hexagrams, Different Methods.

What the Great Commentary says about places two to five

The best-known sayings about places come from the Great Commentary (Xi Ci, 系辞), placed after the line statements, which pairs two with four and three with five:

Two and four share a function but differ in place... Two is often praised and four is often fearful, because it is near. ... Three and five share a function but differ in place... Three often meets misfortune and five often has merit; that is the gradation of the lowly and the noble. If yielding, it is in danger there; if firm, might it prevail?

What does "same function" mean? A note preserved in the Zhou Yi Zhengyi says two and four share "yin function" and three and five "yang function". "Different place" means two is in the inner trigram and four in the outer, while three and five differ in rank. For "four is often fearful" the original's direct reason is just "it is near"; for three and five it is the gradation of the lowly and the noble; the omitted line says two's use is to be yielding and central. The passage never mentions Initial or Top.

Later commentary makes the reasons more specific:

Two sits in a central, harmonious place, so it is often praised... Four presses close on the ruler's place, so it is often afraid... Three is the last place of the lower trigram, so it often meets misfortune; five sits centrally in the honoured place, so it often has merit.

These readings turn "near" into pressing close to the ruler's place; for "four is often fearful" the original's direct reason is only "it is near". The closing question carries a condition too: the subcommentary takes three and five as yang places, where a yin line is in danger and a yang line is equal to the task. The kind of line matters as well as the place.

Central place, proper place, correspondence, adjacency

Four more terms come up whenever places are discussed. None is wording from the Judgments or the line statements; they belong to the Commentary on the Judgments, the Images and later commentators.

Commentators do not apply them uniformly, and "proper place" is shakiest at the ends. Wang Bi (Wei dynasty) notes in his chapter on places that the Images never speak of gaining or missing the proper place for Initial and Top, and that the Xi Ci passage on "same function, different place" speaks only of places two to five. In the Wenyan (文言, the Commentary on the Words of the Text), Top Nine of Qian is "noble but without position", and the Images call Top Six of Xu "not in a proper place": if the top were a yin place, Top Six of Xu could not be called improper; if it were a yang place, Top Nine of Qian could not be called positionless. His conclusion:

Initial and Top are the beginning and end of an affair; they have no fixed yin or yang place.

Using places: Xu as a worked example

A place saying is a clue about which words to look at, not a conclusion. Practise on Xu (需): write each line name, read the line statement first, then see whether a commentary speaks of that place; where none does, supply nothing.

Another chapter of the Xi Ci had already said where this leads:

Changing and moving without settling, flowing through the six empty places, up and down without constancy, firm and yielding exchanging with each other, it cannot be made a fixed rule; only change is what it follows.