The Looking of a Lad and the Regret It Brings to a Grown Mind

Contemplation opens at the greatest distance from what there is to see. Legge's translation calls the first line the looking of a lad, not blamable in men of inferior rank but a matter for regret in superior men, and the Little Symbolism reduces it further to the way of the inferior people. The subject of this hexagram is a view, and its opening line establishes at once that a view can be too small for the person holding it.

The judgment of the hexagram supplies the standard this line falls short of. It pictures a worshipper who has washed his hands but has not yet presented the offering, sincerity and dignity held at the moment before the rite, a spectacle whose power lies in what it suggests rather than in what it displays. Reading such a scene takes a mind trained to look past the surface, and the eye of a lad takes in only the outward action.

Structurally the stroke is yielding, sitting at the very foot of the lower trigram Kun, four places below the strong fifth line the whole figure is organised around, in an odd position that the standard rule counts incorrect. Distance and immaturity together produce the shallow view. The text does not condemn it in someone who has no better vantage. It calls it regrettable only in someone who should have one.