Biting Through opens with a punishment so small it barely reads as one. Legge's translation shows a figure whose feet are set in the stocks so that his toes are hidden from view, and states plainly that there is no error in it. The penalty is real, it is visible, and it stops at the feet. Nothing is broken and nothing is lost that cannot be recovered the moment the constraint is lifted. What the image restrains is movement rather than the person, and the reason for restraining movement this early is that the fault has not yet gone anywhere.
The hexagram sets fire above thunder, lightning over the shock that follows it, and its Judgment recommends legal constraint as the way through an obstruction that will not clear itself. The first line is the place where such constraint costs least. A fault checked at the foot of the hexagram never gathers the momentum the fourth and sixth lines will have to break, so the mildness here is proportion rather than leniency.
A yang stroke correctly occupies this odd position at the base of the lower trigram Zhen, so the firmness that applies the penalty is properly placed and does not overreach. The absence of blame belongs to both parties at once. It belongs to the one restrained, whose fault is still small enough to be answered by stocks rather than by the cangue at the top of the hexagram, and to the one who restrains, who has matched the size of the response to the size of the offence.