Small Taming, Line 1

Legge's translation of this line reads that the first nine, undivided, shows its subject returning and pursuing his own course, asking directly what mistake he should fall into, and answering that there will be good fortune. His brief commentary on the small image adds only that returning to pursue one's own course is right, and that good fortune follows from exactly that.

The line stands at the very base of Qian, the lower trigram of Small Taming, and a firm, undivided line in this lowest and odd numbered place counts as correctly seated. Xiao Xu as a whole turns on a single yielding line, the fourth, holding back the creative strength of the five yang lines beneath and around it, but at the first line that restraint has not yet been felt in any way that could divert its course. The image is of someone who had begun to stray, or who might have strayed, and instead turns back to a path that is genuinely his own, not one borrowed from another's ambition or imposed from outside.

Read against the structure of the hexagram, this earliest line explains why Small Taming opens so mildly. Heaven's own motion has not yet reached the wind above that will eventually check it, so a plain return to one's proper conduct meets no obstacle and draws no blame, and Legge's commentary treats that recovered course as the whole ground of the good fortune the line promises.

When nine at the beginning is drawn as a changing line in Small Taming, the reading concerns a return already available rather than a struggle still ahead. The querent is shown a course that is truly theirs to resume, and the line promises no error and good fortune specifically because nothing yet stands in the way of that return. It is the mildest line in a hexagram whose entire theme is mild, gentle restraint holding back a much greater force, and at this first position the restraining influence, the single yielding fourth line, has not yet reached down this far.

Flipping this line changes the lower trigram from Qian to Xun, so both trigrams of the hexagram become Xun, Wind over Wind, the hexagram called The Gentle. Where Small Taming showed one yielding line quietly checking five firm ones, The Gentle doubles the gentle, penetrating force throughout the whole figure. The movement from this line is a movement further into gentleness itself: what began as a single, incidental restraint becomes the hexagram's entire character, wind moving upon wind, influence that spreads by penetrating rather than by force.

In the arc of Small Taming's six lines, position one is the point of least resistance, before the taming influence has organized itself at all. A reading that lands here suggests the moment to return to one's own course is now, before the small holds back the great in earnest, and that the deeper lesson, an entire hexagram given over to gentle penetration, is already latent in this first quiet step.