Influence, Line 1

Influence begins at the point of the body furthest from the heart. Legge's translation shows the subject moving his great toes, and the commentary on the image says his mind is set on what is beyond himself. Nothing has yet happened that anybody could act on. A toe moves, and the whole content of the line is that a movement has registered at an extremity while the person it belongs to has not gone anywhere at all.

The figure is built as an ascending series through the body and this is its first station. Lake rests above mountain, the trigram of joy above the trigram of stillness, and the classic reads the pair as mutual attraction, something open resting on something firm. Its judgement speaks of a young lady taken in marriage, which frames the whole hexagram in the courtship terms of the society the text comes from. That framing belongs to the period. The process the lines actually trace, an influence rising from an extremity through a body until it reaches speech, does not depend on it.

The stroke is yielding in an odd place, incorrect by the ordinary rule, at the floor of the lower trigram Gen. Gen is the mountain and its character is stopping, so a soft line at its base has very little movement available and no strength with which to force any. The text neither praises nor blames it, which is unusual, and the omission is the reading: a stirring at the toe is not yet a thing an outcome can be attached to.

Six at the beginning is a reading about noticing rather than about doing. The querent is shown the first faint registration of an attraction, at the furthest extremity of the body, and the text gives no judgement of fortune at all. That silence is the counsel. There is not yet enough present to be right or wrong about, and treating a first stirring as though it were a decision is the error the line quietly guards against.

The commentary adds the one detail that makes the moment worth recording: the subject's mind is already set on what lies beyond him. Something outside has begun to pull. In a hexagram whose entire subject is how one thing moves another, the start of that movement is worth marking even though acting on it would be premature, and the second line will shortly show what becomes of somebody who acts at this stage anyway.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Gen becomes Li and the figure becomes Revolution, King Wen 49, in which an old order is stripped away and the mandate passes to other hands. That is a startling destination for so small a stirring and it is the honest one. Every real change of course in a life begins as something too slight to justify itself, and the classic is willing to say that the toe moving and the mandate turning are one process observed from two distances.