Breakthrough, Line 1

The first line of Breakthrough (King Wen 43) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as strength advancing with the toes alone, going forward without the means to succeed. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns the culprit's guilt exhibited at the royal court, with sincere and earnest appeal, and a consciousness of the peril in cutting the criminal off, 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 Qian, heaven in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Dui, lake in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads the waters of a marsh mounted above heaven; the superior man bestows his gifts on those below rather than letting them accumulate unused, and the first line takes its place inside that combined picture of Qian below and Dui above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Qian is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Strength Advancing with the Toes Alone, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.

As a divinatory line, nine at the first place of Breakthrough reads within the hexagram's overall concern with the culprit's guilt exhibited at the royal court, with sincere and earnest appeal, and a consciousness of the peril in cutting the criminal off. The line occupies a place proper to its own nature in the classical doctrine that odd places favour a firm, yang line and even places favour a yielding, yin line. Its own text, that strength advancing with the toes alone, going forward without the means to succeed, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The first line corresponds by classical convention with the fourth line, and the two do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Qian in the lower position of the figure, the line marks the opening of the situation, before the trigram above it has any part in the reading, one stage in the six stage movement the hexagram traces from its first line to its last.

A change at this line, from yang to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the first line of Breakthrough turns Qian into Xun while the other trigram, Dui, stays as it is, which yields Breakthrough's changing partner, Great Preponderance (King Wen 28), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.