Work on the Decayed opens not with decay itself but with the heir who inherits it. Legge's translation shows a son dealing with the troubles caused by his father, and adds that if the son is capable the father escapes the blame of having erred, so that a perilous position ends in good fortune. The line does not accuse the previous generation. It observes that a fault left in place becomes the inheritance of whoever comes next, and that the willingness to take it up is what converts an inherited failure into a repair rather than a grievance.
The hexagram sets Mountain above Wind, the still upper trigram Gen pressing down on the moving lower trigram Xun, an image classical commentary reads as air held beneath stone until it spoils. This first line lies at the very bottom of that stagnation, where the decay is oldest, least visible and least discussed. A yielding stroke occupies an odd place here, which the standard rule counts incorrect, and the text names the position perilous in exactly those terms.
The Little Symbolism explains the line by saying that the son has entered into his father's work, and that phrase carries its whole sense. Nothing is repaired by declaring the fault. It is repaired by stepping inside the undertaking that produced it and continuing correctly from within, which is why danger and a good ending stand in the same sentence.