Drawn as a changing line, the opening stroke of Biting Through usually points to a check that has just been placed on a querent, or one the querent is about to place on somebody else. Its counsel is to accept how small the check is. A restriction that reaches only the toes is not a verdict on anyone's character; it is a boundary drawn while the matter is still cheap to bound. Resisting it, or reading it as an insult, is what converts a nuisance into the harder cases the middle of this hexagram spends four lines describing.
Read from the other side of the same situation, the line advises anyone holding authority to answer a first offence in proportion to it. The stocks are chosen precisely because they are recoverable. A response that damages what it corrects has already failed, however justified it may feel in the moment, and the explicit grant of no error attaches here to restraint rather than to severity.
The stroke is yang in an odd place at the base of the lower trigram Zhen, the trigram of movement and sudden shock, which is why the image concerns arresting motion rather than inflicting loss. A reading landing here often marks the earliest recoverable point in a dispute, before positions have hardened and before anyone has had to defend a stated position in public. What can be done cheaply now is the alternative to what the sixth line does expensively later.