Innocence, Line 1

Wu Wang begins with a strong line correctly placed at the foot of the lower trigram Zhen, and Legge's translation shows its subject entirely free from insincerity, with good fortune attending any advance. Nothing is qualified. The hexagram's whole subject, action arising naturally rather than from calculation, is present in its purest form at the very first position, before circumstance has had any chance to complicate it.

Zhen is movement, and this is the one yang stroke generating that movement from below. The line does not describe a decision weighed and then taken; it describes an impulse that was never divided against itself in the first place. Classical commentary reads the good fortune as following from that undividedness rather than from any calculation of outcome, which is why the text can promise it without naming what the advance is toward.

Read against the rest of the figure, this position is the standard the others are tested against. The second harvests what it never planned for, the third suffers a loss it did not cause, the fifth falls ill without fault, and the sixth pushes the same innocent impulse one step too far. All of them show what happens to innocence once the world gets hold of it. Here, at the start, it is simply itself, and that alone is enough for the text to call the advance fortunate.

Trust the first impulse. That is the practical content of this changing line, and it is unusually direct: the movement in question is described as free of insincerity, and the advance following from it is called fortunate with no condition attached. Someone drawing it is not being asked to examine their motives so much as told that, on this occasion, the motives are already clean.

The difficulty in acting on such counsel is that it forbids the usual safeguard. Innocence in this hexagram is spoiled by calculation, so the ordinary move of pausing to work out what one stands to gain would introduce exactly the crookedness the Judgment warns against. The line asks for the thing done because it is right and obvious, at the moment it is obvious, and not for a version of it improved by strategy.

Correctly placed at the base of the lower trigram Zhen, this is the stroke from which the figure's whole movement rises, and a reading landing here usually marks a genuine beginning rather than a continuation. Nothing has yet been committed and nothing has yet gone wrong, so the querent is being told that whatever they are moved to do from a clear motive at this point can safely be done. What the line does not do is extend that assurance any distance ahead, which is why the positions above it have to take up the same question again under considerably harder conditions.