The Family, Line 1

The Family begins with a rule rather than with a relationship. Legge's translation shows the subject establishing restrictive regulations in his household, and says that occasion for repentance will disappear. Nothing has gone wrong yet, and that is the entire argument of the line. The regret being made to disappear is a regret nobody has incurred, because the boundary was drawn while drawing it was still a neutral act rather than a response to somebody in particular.

The stroke is strong and correctly placed at the bottom of the lower trigram Li, the point at which a household is being constituted rather than governed. Firmness at the foot of a figure usually reads as impatience; here it reads as timing. A rule introduced at the beginning belongs to the arrangement itself, while the same rule introduced later belongs to whoever introduced it, and the second kind is what a family argues about for years afterwards.

This is also why the hexagram opens here instead of at the fifth line, where the king appears. The classic builds its account of order upward from the smallest and earliest act, and puts the least dramatic line first on purpose. Nothing in the household has been tested at this station. What the line asks for is the discipline to do unglamorous work at the one moment when it costs nothing, which is the only moment at which it will ever cost nothing.

Nine at the beginning is a reading about timing rather than about strictness. The line shows restrictions established in the household and says that cause for regret disappears. A querent drawing it is usually at the start of something shared, a home, a partnership, a working arrangement whose terms nobody has yet felt any need to state, and the counsel is to state them now, while stating them is uncontroversial.

The practical weight sits on what the line does not describe. There is no dispute in it, no offender and no grievance being answered, and that absence is the condition under which a boundary can be set without being received as an accusation. A reading arriving here is being told that it holds an advantage which will not survive the first real disagreement, and that the advantage is worth spending immediately rather than saving.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Li becomes Gen and the figure becomes Development, King Wen 53, the gradual advance the classic illustrates through a bird moving stage by stage and refuses to let hurry. That destination explains what the early rule is for. Order established at the outset is what makes slow growth possible afterwards, and an arrangement that has to renegotiate its own terms at every stage never gets far enough to experience the patient progress this figure describes.