Regulations Set at the Threshold, Before Anything Goes Wrong

The Family begins with a rule rather than with a relationship. Legge's translation shows the subject establishing restrictive regulations in his household, and says that occasion for repentance will disappear. Nothing has gone wrong yet, and that is the entire argument of the line. The regret being made to disappear is a regret nobody has incurred, because the boundary was drawn while drawing it was still a neutral act rather than a response to somebody in particular.

The stroke is strong and correctly placed at the bottom of the lower trigram Li, the point at which a household is being constituted rather than governed. Firmness at the foot of a figure usually reads as impatience; here it reads as timing. A rule introduced at the beginning belongs to the arrangement itself, while the same rule introduced later belongs to whoever introduced it, and the second kind is what a family argues about for years afterwards.

This is also why the hexagram opens here instead of at the fifth line, where the king appears. The classic builds its account of order upward from the smallest and earliest act, and puts the least dramatic line first on purpose. Nothing in the household has been tested at this station. What the line asks for is the discipline to do unglamorous work at the one moment when it costs nothing, which is the only moment at which it will ever cost nothing.