EN (English)
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One of the four line values
Old yang
老陽 · Lǎo Yáng
The moving yang line, numbered nine. It is drawn solid, it carries a line text you read, and it turns into its opposite in the hexagram that follows.
nine
moving line
yang at its limit
transformation
- Ritual number
- 9
- Drawn as
- A solid line
- Moves
- Yes
- In the second hexagram
- Becomes its opposite
- Line text read
- Yes
- Chinese
- 老陽 · Lǎo Yáng
What it means
Casting the I Ching does not produce a simple yes or no for each line. It produces one of four values, and old yang, the nine, is yang that has reached the end of its range.
The classic's cosmology has no static states at the extreme. What is completely yang is already becoming yin, the way midsummer is the point at which the days start shortening. So a nine is drawn as a solid line in the first hexagram, and drawn broken in the second one, and the line text attached to it is the part of the oracle that speaks to you most directly.
The name matters in the text itself. Where the classic wants to say the first line of a hexagram is a moving yang line, it writes "nine at the beginning", and the fifth line becomes "nine in the fifth place". Every line text in the book is labelled this way, which is why the numbers six and nine appear so often in the Zhouyi.
In a reading
When a line comes up as a nine, read that line's text. It is describing the specific point where the situation is under pressure and about to give.
Nines tend to read as active: something you are doing, or something being done in the matter, that is at full extension and cannot be held there.
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