EN (English)
①
Line position 1 of 6
The first line
初 · Chū
Hexagrams are read from the bottom up, so the first line is where the situation begins: early, low, and usually too soon to tell.
beginning
obscurity
the ground
not yet
- Position
- 1 from the bottom
- Trigram
- Lower trigram
- Place
- Yang place
- Centrality
- Not central
- Corresponds with
- The fourth line
- Classical name
- 初 (Chū)
What it means
A hexagram is built and read from the ground up, so the line at the bottom of the figure is the first one, and the classic calls it 初 rather than giving it a number. It is the beginning of the matter and the bottom of whatever hierarchy the hexagram is describing: the newcomer, the apprentice, the toes, the first mile.
Two consequences follow, and the line texts repeat them constantly. The first is obscurity. Nobody is watching yet, which is a protection as much as a frustration; hexagram 1's first line has the dragon still hidden and tells you not to act. The second is leverage. Everything above rests on this line, so a mistake here is cheap to fix now and expensive later.
The first place is a yang position, which means a solid line here is correct and an open line is not, though correctness is only one factor among several. Its correspondence is with the fourth line, the first line of the upper trigram: the ground reporting to the level just above the threshold.
In a reading
When the first line moves, the reading is about a start, and usually about restraint at the start. The classic's advice at the bottom is overwhelmingly to wait, to check the footing, or to keep the intention private a while longer.
Read it also as the question of foundations. If a hexagram is describing something going wrong higher up, the first line often shows where the error was set.
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