The Clinging, Line 1

The Clinging begins with a person whose footing is not yet sure. Legge's translation shows the subject ready to move with confused steps, treading at the same time with reverent attention, and gives no mistake as the outcome. The commentary on the image says plainly that the reverence directed at those confused steps is the means by which error is avoided. Nothing about the situation is settled. What saves the line is an attitude brought to unsettled ground rather than any advantage in the ground itself.

The hexagram is the trigram of fire and brightness set on top of itself, and its judgement asks for firm correctness and for the nourishing of a docility like the cow's. Fire is the one element in the set with no substance of its own, since it burns only by clinging to what feeds it. A first line in such a figure is brightness at the moment it catches, when it has taken hold of something but has not yet steadied into a flame that gives usable light.

The stroke is strong and correctly placed in an odd seat at the floor of the lower trigram Li, which is why the situation is recoverable at all. Strength at the bottom of a figure has energy and no elevation, and it is standing in the trigram whose whole character is dependence on something else. The confusion of the steps is that combination stated as an image: real force, applied by somebody who cannot yet see where they are putting their feet.

Nine at the beginning counsels a querent to slow down and to treat a beginning as something requiring care rather than confidence. The image of steps crossing one another describes a start made in disorder, and the text withholds any promise of success while still granting that no fault attaches. That combination is unusual in the classic and worth reading exactly: the line does not say things will go well, only that nothing will be spoiled while the person moving is paying proper attention.

Practically it addresses the moment when someone has energy for a new undertaking and no clear picture of it yet. The commentary is explicit that reverence is what prevents the mistake, which puts the whole weight of the reading on conduct rather than on circumstance. Hurry is the specific danger here, because a strong line at the bottom of a bright figure tends to mistake its own eagerness for clarity and to act on the mistake immediately.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Li becomes Gen and the figure becomes The Wanderer, King Wen 56, in which a traveller depends on the goodwill of places that are not his own. The destination is an honest one for a querent standing at a confused beginning. Somebody who does not yet know the ground is in the position of a stranger, and what the classic asks of a stranger is the same care and modesty this line has already required.