Contemplation, Line 1

Contemplation opens at the greatest distance from what there is to see. Legge's translation calls the first line the looking of a lad, not blamable in men of inferior rank but a matter for regret in superior men, and the Little Symbolism reduces it further to the way of the inferior people. The subject of this hexagram is a view, and its opening line establishes at once that a view can be too small for the person holding it.

The judgment of the hexagram supplies the standard this line falls short of. It pictures a worshipper who has washed his hands but has not yet presented the offering, sincerity and dignity held at the moment before the rite, a spectacle whose power lies in what it suggests rather than in what it displays. Reading such a scene takes a mind trained to look past the surface, and the eye of a lad takes in only the outward action.

Structurally the stroke is yielding, sitting at the very foot of the lower trigram Kun, four places below the strong fifth line the whole figure is organised around, in an odd position that the standard rule counts incorrect. Distance and immaturity together produce the shallow view. The text does not condemn it in someone who has no better vantage. It calls it regrettable only in someone who should have one.

Six at the beginning is drawn when a querent is seeing a situation from too far away and too plainly. The line permits shallowness in those with no better vantage and calls it a matter for regret in anyone who ought to understand more, which makes it one of the sharper cautions in the Yi about the adequacy of one's own perception rather than about the situation itself.

Readings landing here typically involve a judgment already formed on the visible surface of things, an early impression of a person, an institution or an offer, taken as sufficient when it is not. The remedy is not a decision. It is a better position from which to look, since a yielding line at the foot of the lower trigram Kun is simply too far from the strong fifth line for anything else to help.

The comparison the text sets up is between rank and expectation, and it is worth taking practically rather than socially. Whoever is expected to understand a matter deeply bears the cost of understanding it shallowly, while whoever is not can be excused. A querent drawing this line should settle which of those two positions they actually occupy before acting on what they believe they have seen. The line is a question about the observer, and it has to be answered before any question about the thing observed.