Great Power, Line 1

Great Power opens with strength in the wrong place. Legge's translation shows the subject manifesting his vigour in his toes and states that to advance on that footing brings evil, with certainty, while the commentary on the image says it will lead to exhaustion. The hexagram is thunder above heaven, four strong lines rising under two yielding ones, and after the doubled Qian it is the most vigorous figure in the classic. This line is that vigour before it has anywhere to go.

The toes are the lowest part of the body, and the first place of a hexagram is where nothing has yet been built. A strong stroke correctly placed in an odd seat at the base of the lower trigram Qian is genuinely powerful and genuinely without position, and the combination is what the text objects to. Power at the bottom is measured not against an opponent but against the distance it would have to travel, and the certainty in the verdict is worth noting, because the classic rarely says that evil is certain.

The Great Symbolism draws from thunder rolling above heaven the counsel that the superior man takes no step which is not according to propriety, and this line is the first test of it. Nothing is wrong with the strength itself. What is wrong is that it has been shown at the toes, where showing is the only thing it can do. The exhaustion the commentary predicts is the price of a movement made on capacity alone with no standing behind it.

Nine at the beginning warns against acting on power a querent has but cannot yet apply. The line puts the vigour in the toes, promises misfortune if it is used to advance, and the commentary adds exhaustion rather than defeat, which is the more useful word of the two. Somebody drawing this usually has real capability and is impatient with the delay, and the text does not dispute the capability at all. It disputes the timing.

The position is the reason. A strong stroke correctly placed at the foot of the lower trigram Qian stands at the greatest possible distance from anywhere that strength counts for something, with four more lines of the most forceful figure in the classic above it. The flatness of the verdict is worth noticing too, since the classic more often gives conditions and consequences than plain predictions, and here it gives one and calls it certain.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Qian becomes Xun and the figure becomes Duration, King Wen 32, in which what lasts does so by holding a course rather than by exerting itself. That destination is the correction the line declines to spell out. What premature strength needs is not more strength but time inside a steady arrangement, and the classic files the remedy for the impatient bottom line of Great Power under the figure of persistence.