Coming to Meet, Line 1

The first line of Coming to Meet (King Wen 44) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as tied and fastened to a metal drag, firm correctness brings good fortune, but if it moves at all evil appears, like a lean pig sure to keep jumping about. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns a bold, strong female met unexpectedly; not good to marry such a one, since she should not be long associated with, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the lowest place of the lower trigram Xun, wind in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Qian, heaven in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads wind beneath heaven; the sovereign delivers his charges and announcements to the four quarters, and the first line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Qian above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Xun is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Being Tied and Fastened to a Metal Drag, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.

As a divinatory line, six at the first place of Coming to Meet reads within the hexagram's overall concern with a bold, strong female met unexpectedly; not good to marry such a one, since she should not be long associated with. The line occupies a place that does not match its own nature in the classical doctrine that odd places favour a firm, yang line and even places favour a yielding, yin line. Its own text, that tied and fastened to a metal drag, firm correctness brings good fortune, but if it moves at all evil appears, like a lean pig sure to keep jumping about, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The first line corresponds by classical convention with the fourth line, and the two correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Xun in the lower position of the figure, the line marks the opening of the situation, before the trigram above it has any part in the reading, one stage in the six stage movement the hexagram traces from its first line to its last.

A change at this line, from yin to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the first line of Coming to Meet turns Xun into Qian while the other trigram, Qian, stays as it is, which yields Coming to Meet's changing partner, The Creative (King Wen 1), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.