Fellowship, Line 1

The first line of Fellowship with Men shows its subject going out to seek fellowship at the gate of the city rather than remaining inside a private courtyard. Legge's nineteenth century translation keeps the image spare: union sought in the open, at the threshold between one's own household and the wider world, and the verdict attached to it is simply that there is no error. Nothing here promises great achievement. The line only establishes that beginning a fellowship in public, before it narrows into anything exclusive, cannot itself be faulted.

Hexagram 13 places Heaven above Fire, and its whole teaching turns on keeping union broad rather than confined. The gate is the natural image for that teaching at its very first line: a gate opens onto ground shared by everyone, unlike the enclosed clan of the second line that follows it. To seek fellowship there, before any private tie has had the chance to narrow the circle, is to start the hexagram's movement in exactly the direction its Judgment recommends, toward fellowship founded on universal principle rather than kinship or faction.

This is the lowest place of the lower trigram Li, fire's own trigram, and a yang line correctly occupies an odd position here, giving the opening move a soundness that matches its openness. Nothing yet has been tested. The line describes only the choice to go outward rather than inward at the very start, a choice whose value the rest of the hexagram will spend five more lines proving or complicating.

As a divinatory line, the first nine of Fellowship with Men counsels a querent to begin any new alliance, partnership, or shared undertaking in the open rather than through some narrower, more private channel. The image of going out at the gate suggests literally stepping beyond one's own household or immediate circle before committing to union with others, and the line's judgment, no error, tells the querent that this outward first step cannot itself be blamed even if the fellowship it seeks is not yet secured.

Within the hexagram's larger movement, this line stands at the greatest possible distance from the single yielding line at the second place, the line every other line in the hexagram is drawn toward as fellowship's true center. Being correctly placed but furthest from that center, the first line's task is simply to set out toward it rather than to arrive. A reading landing here often marks the very beginning of a relationship or collaboration whose real test, and real reward, still lie ahead in the lines that follow.

Read against the hexagram's warning that fellowship confined to one's own kind is a narrower and lesser thing, the first line's example matters precisely because it comes before any such narrowing has occurred. The querent is advised that an open, public beginning, sought honestly and without private motive, is the soundest possible foundation, even though the line offers no promise beyond that soundness. What is built afterward will depend on how faithfully the union stays open as it develops.