The Gentle, Line 1

The first line of The Gentle (King Wen 57) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as advancing and receding, advantage found in the firmness of a soldier. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns some small attainment and progress, advantage in having somewhere to go, advantage in seeing the great man, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the lowest place of the lower trigram Xun, wind in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Xun, wind in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads winds following one on another; the superior man reiterates his orders and carries his affairs into effect, and the first line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Xun above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Xun is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Advancing and Receding, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.

As a divinatory line, six at the first place of The Gentle reads within the hexagram's overall concern with some small attainment and progress, advantage in having somewhere to go, advantage in seeing the great man. The line occupies a place that does not match its own nature in the classical doctrine that odd places favour a firm, yang line and even places favour a yielding, yin line. Its own text, that advancing and receding, advantage found in the firmness of a soldier, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The first line corresponds by classical convention with the fourth line, and the two do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Xun in the lower position of the figure, the line marks the opening of the situation, before the trigram above it has any part in the reading, one stage in the six stage movement the hexagram traces from its first line to its last.

A change at this line, from yin to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the first line of The Gentle turns Xun into Qian while the other trigram, Xun, stays as it is, which yields The Gentle's changing partner, Small Taming (King Wen 9), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.