Holding Together opens with an image of plain pottery rather than of people. Legge's translation shows the subject seeking, through sincerity, to win the attachment of what it approaches, and adds that if the breast is as full of good faith as an earthenware vessel is of its contents, further good fortune will follow in the end. The vessel is deliberately common. Nothing about it is ornamented or valuable in itself, and its whole worth lies in being genuinely full, which is exactly the standard the line sets for the sincerity that begins a union.
The Great Symbolism of the hexagram places water above the earth, a flow that runs together into whatever hollows will hold it, and reads the ancient kings as founding their states and keeping affectionate relations with their princes on that pattern. The first line is where that gathering starts. Nothing has yet been established, no bond has been tested, and the only thing the line can offer is the quality of its own intention.
Yielding at the base of the lower trigram Kun, the line lies further from the ruling fifth place than any other in the figure, and what it offers has to cross the whole height of the hexagram before it is answered. The small commentary promises that further good fortune comes, not merely that error is avoided. Union begun in genuine good faith, without display and without calculation, is credited here with drawing more than it set out to gain.