Peace, Line 1

Legge's translation of the first line reads that the subject is like grass pulled up, bringing with it the stalks connected to it by their roots, and that advance on the part of its subject will be fortunate. The image is agricultural and communal at once, one clump of grass never rising alone, since pulling on any single stalk lifts every stalk still bound to it by a shared root.

The line sits at the base of Qian, the lower trigram of Heaven, in the lowest and correctly yang seated place, the point at which Peace begins its ascent of three unbroken yang lines advancing together toward the receptive earth above. Nothing in the hexagram's Judgment describes solitary striving; the great is said to come and the small to go, and the first line shows exactly how that arrival happens, not as one figure's isolated advance but as an entire company of connected, similarly disposed lines rising as one body.

Read against Peace's whole structure, heaven and earth in communication, the first line establishes the pattern the rest of the lower trigram will continue, advance here draws its strength from connection rather than from any single line's individual merit, and it is precisely that mutual support which the Judgment's good fortune depends on from the outset.

As a changing line, nine at the beginning of Peace reads as good fortune found in company rather than in solitary effort. The querent is shown grass pulled up bringing its connected stalks with it, an image of advance that succeeds because it is shared, and the reading suggests that whatever moves forward now moves together with others of like disposition, not as an isolated venture.

Flipping this line changes the lower trigram from Qian to Xun, Wood, giving Kun over Xun, the hexagram called Pushing Upward. The vigorous, connected rising of the first line gives way, on the far side of change, to a hexagram concerned with patient ascent, wood growing up through the receptive earth rather than heaven advancing to meet it. The movement is from a broad shared advance toward a narrower and slower climb, as though the earliest push of a common undertaking, once changed, becomes instead the steady effort that gains its height by degrees.

Within Peace's arc, the first line is where the hexagram's whole rising movement of yang into a position of harmony with yin begins, before any of the settled conditions the later lines describe have had time to develop. A reading landing here suggests the moment favors advancing now, together with whatever companions share the same root, since the ground ahead has not yet needed the caution the middle lines will show.