Difficulty at the Beginning

Hexagram 3 is where readers who have started at the beginning first meet the Zhou Yi's actual texture, and it is not what the first two hexagrams prepare them for.

Its lines include a horseman advancing and then retreating, a marriage party that is not a raid, waiting ten years before betrothal, a deer pursued into the forest without a guide, and finally weeping blood. These are not philosophical propositions. They are fragments of Bronze Age life, hunting, marriage negotiation, raiding, mourning, recorded as omen material because a diviner once matched them to an outcome.

This is the Zhou Yi, the core stratum, and modern scholarship places its assembly in something close to its present form somewhere in a wide range from the tenth to the fourth century BC. Edward Shaughnessy has argued for the last quarter of the ninth century, during the reign of King Xuan of Zhou. Other datings within that range are held seriously, and the question is genuinely open.

The philosophical apparatus that most readers meet first, the superior person, the cultivation of virtue, the correspondence of the trigrams to natural forces, belongs to the Ten Wings, a set of commentaries composed centuries later and traditionally ascribed to Confucius. That ascription was already being questioned inside the Chinese tradition by the eleventh century, and no serious scholar now defends it. The Wings are not the Zhou Yi. They are the first great commentary on it, and they are very good, but they are a second voice.

The hexagram is conventionally called Difficulty at the Beginning, and the image usually given for it is a plant pushing through hard ground, an obstruction that is a sign of life rather than of failure.

The reading follows from that. It describes a start that is not going smoothly, in a situation where the difficulty is structural rather than a verdict: things are tangled because they are new, not because they are wrong. Wilhelm's judgement advises that it furthers one to appoint helpers, which is unusually concrete practical advice and is one of the passages where the text sounds most like a person talking to another person.

The advance-and-retreat line at the bottom is the one most often quoted, and it carries the hexagram's characteristic instruction: movement that is real but not yet committed. The reading is generally that the querent should establish a position before pressing forward, and that hesitation here is competence rather than weakness.

The counterpart hexagram, Youthful Folly, is this figure turned upside down, and the pair is worth reading together. The King Wen sequence is built substantially out of such pairs, one hexagram followed by its inversion, or where inversion produces the same figure, by its opposite, and noticing the pairing usually says more about a hexagram's place in the book than any individual commentary does.

Translations diverge less here than on the first two hexagrams, largely because the imagery is concrete enough to constrain the translator.