Cords and the Thicket of Thorns, a Zhou Punishment Set Down Plainly

The topmost line describes a punishment. The line text has the subject bound with cords and ropes and placed in a thicket of thorns, and states that in three years he does not learn the course for himself, with evil as the outcome. Binding a prisoner and confining him within a thorn enclosure was a penal practice of the period the text comes from, and it is given here as the text has it rather than softened into metaphor. A Zhou reader would have understood a specific sentence, not a picture of feeling trapped.

What the line does with that material is where its weight lies. The three years are the same measure of a full cycle the classic uses elsewhere for a course that has hardened into a settled one, and the text places the failure not in the confinement but in what does not happen during it. The subject does not learn the course. Danger that began as circumstance has been made permanent by the person inside it, and the verdict of evil attaches to that, which is why this line closes a hexagram whose other lines repeatedly show peril being kept survivable.

The stroke is yielding in an even place, correct by the ordinary rule, at the very top of the upper trigram Kan and past the ruling fifth line that held the water level. Correctness of position saves nothing at the extremity. Set against the contained pit of the line below it, the sixth shows what the same danger becomes when nobody is holding the level and nobody is learning.