The first line of The Cauldron (King Wen 50) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the caldron overturned with its feet turned up, yet advantage in getting rid of what was bad inside it, as when a concubine is taken for the sake of her son. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns great progress and success, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.
Structurally the line stands at the lowest place of the lower trigram Xun, wind in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Li, fire in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads wood entering into fire, the image of cooking; the superior man keeps every position correct and makes secure the appointment received from heaven, and the first line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Li above.
Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Xun is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Caldron Overturned with its Feet Turned Up, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.