Opposition, Line 1

Opposition opens with two instructions that both amount to leaving things alone. Legge's translation says occasion for repentance will disappear, that a man who loses his horses need not go after them because they will return of themselves, and that meeting bad men brings no error. Nothing in the line is done. Its whole counsel is a pair of refusals, one against pursuit and one against exclusion, and in a figure about estrangement those turn out to be the same refusal twice.

The horses matter because pursuit in a time of general disunion converts a loss into a quarrel. What has gone will come back if it belongs, and chasing it guarantees a confrontation with whoever is holding it. The bad men matter for the mirror reason. When people are already set against one another, refusing contact with everybody who looks unsuitable narrows a person's world to nothing, and the classic states plainly that the contact carries no blame.

This is the only line in the hexagram standing in its correct place, strong in an odd seat at the foot of the lower trigram Dui. Every other stroke in the figure is misplaced by the ordinary rule, which is as exact a structural picture of estrangement as the classic draws anywhere. Being the one correctly seated line is why this one can afford to be passive. It has nothing to repair, and its counsel is aimed entirely at not manufacturing something to repair.

Nine at the beginning is a reading against effort. The horses are lost and will return unsought, the disagreeable people are met without blame, and the cause for regret disappears without anybody addressing it. A querent drawing this line is generally about to chase something or about to cut somebody off, and the counsel is to do neither, on the grounds that a time of estrangement makes both moves worse than the situation they were meant to answer.

The two halves are worth separating in practice. Not pursuing what has been lost is a judgement about time, that the thing will find its way back if it was ever really yours. Not refusing the bad man is a judgement about people, that the categories a person sorts others into become unreliable exactly when everyone is at odds. Neither is a counsel of trust. Both are counsels against acting on suspicion while suspicion is the weather.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Dui becomes Kan and the figure becomes Before Completion, King Wen 64, the last hexagram of the classic, in which every line is out of place and the crossing is unfinished. That destination is candid about what patience buys here. The situation stays unresolved, the classic is emphatic that unresolved is not the same as lost, and the young fox that has almost crossed the stream is the image it uses for precisely this stage.