Confused Steps Trodden with Reverence at the Base of the Fire

The Clinging begins with a person whose footing is not yet sure. Legge's translation shows the subject ready to move with confused steps, treading at the same time with reverent attention, and gives no mistake as the outcome. The commentary on the image says plainly that the reverence directed at those confused steps is the means by which error is avoided. Nothing about the situation is settled. What saves the line is an attitude brought to unsettled ground rather than any advantage in the ground itself.

The hexagram is the trigram of fire and brightness set on top of itself, and its judgement asks for firm correctness and for the nourishing of a docility like the cow's. Fire is the one element in the set with no substance of its own, since it burns only by clinging to what feeds it. A first line in such a figure is brightness at the moment it catches, when it has taken hold of something but has not yet steadied into a flame that gives usable light.

The stroke is strong and correctly placed in an odd seat at the floor of the lower trigram Li, which is why the situation is recoverable at all. Strength at the bottom of a figure has energy and no elevation, and it is standing in the trigram whose whole character is dependence on something else. The confusion of the steps is that combination stated as an image: real force, applied by somebody who cannot yet see where they are putting their feet.