Limitation, Line 1

The first line of Limitation (King Wen 60) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as not going beyond the courtyard's outer gate, no error. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns progress and attainment, but if the regulations it sets are severe and difficult, they cannot be maintained for long, 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 Dui, lake in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Kan, water in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads water above a marsh; the superior man constructs his methods of numbering and measurement, and considers points of virtue and conduct, and the first line takes its place inside that combined picture of Dui below and Kan above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Dui is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Not Going Beyond the Courtyard's Outer Gate, 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, nine at the first place of Limitation reads within the hexagram's overall concern with progress and attainment, but if the regulations it sets are severe and difficult, they cannot be maintained for long. The line occupies a place proper to 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 not going beyond the courtyard's outer gate, no error, 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 correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Dui 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 yang to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the first line of Limitation turns Dui into Kan while the other trigram, Kan, stays as it is, which yields Limitation's changing partner, The Abysmal (King Wen 29), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.