Flying With Drooping Wings and Three Days Without Food

Ming Yi opens with a bird already in the air. Legge's translation shows the subject of the darkening in flight and letting its wings droop, and adds that the superior man on his journey may go three days without eating, and that wherever he arrives the master of the house has words for him. Nothing has struck him yet. The whole of the line is a departure made early, at a moment when staying would still have looked reasonable to everyone watching.

The drooping wings carry the reading. A bird flying with its wings down is not gliding in triumph; it is keeping low, and the posture is a deliberate reduction of the space it takes up. The hexagram sets the earth above the fire, so brightness here is under something, and the first line is the furthest point from the darkness that occupies the upper trigram. Distance is its only advantage and it spends that advantage immediately.

The stroke is strong and correctly placed at the very bottom of the lower trigram Li, the trigram of light and clear seeing. Its position is the reason the flight is possible at all: it can see what is coming and it is not yet held by anything. The three days of hunger and the householder's remarks are given without complaint and without being softened, and they are the price of moving before the situation has made the case for moving. The classic does not call the line fortunate. It records what leaving costs and lets the cost stand.