The Couch Attacked at Its Legs, Where Erosion Always Begins

Splitting Apart opens underneath the furniture. Legge's translation shows the couch being overturned by injury to its legs, says the injury will go on to destroy all firm correctness, and gives the verdict of evil. Nothing visible has yet been lost. A couch missing part of a leg still holds a sleeper, and the person lying on it may not know anything has happened, which is exactly the condition the line is describing. Damage begins where it is least observed and where nobody thinks to look.

The hexagram sets the mountain above the earth, a heavy summit resting on ground that is quietly being carried away beneath it, and its Judgment advises against movement in any direction. The first line explains why the advice comes so early. What is failing here is support rather than surface, and a structure whose support is failing is made worse by being loaded or moved, however sound it still looks.

A yielding stroke stands in this odd position, incorrect by the letter of the rule and lowest in the lower trigram Kun, with no firm line anywhere below it. That is the structural picture of the image. The legs of the couch have nothing under them either. The severity of the verdict is not proportionate to the visible damage but to the direction of it, since the text explicitly follows the injury upward rather than stopping at what has been broken so far.