Nourishment, Line 1

Nourishment opens with a line that already holds something worth keeping and puts it down. Legge's translation gives the image of an efficacious tortoise set aside while its owner stares at another until his own lower jaw hangs slack, and it names the result as evil without qualification. The tortoise of the Zhou period was an instrument of divination and, in the commentary tradition, a creature held to sustain itself on air alone. Either reading carries the same weight: the subject begins with a genuine means of nourishment that belongs to him, and loses it by watching somebody else eat.

The hexagram takes its whole shape from the mouth. A solid stroke at the bottom, a solid stroke at the top, and four yielding strokes between them draw the outline of open jaws, which is why the Great Symbolism, reading mountain above thunder, draws from the figure a counsel that words be watched and that eating and drinking be kept temperate. This first line is the lower lip of that mouth, the base of the lower trigram Zhen, and a yang stroke correctly occupies the odd place. Weakness is therefore not the fault on offer here. Capacity is present and goes unused.

What the imagery condemns is the posture rather than the appetite. A slackened jaw is a body arranged for watching rather than for eating, and the tortoise is lost to no thief. Set first in a hexagram concerned throughout with who is fed and by whom, the line establishes the error the remaining five will answer in turn: looking outward for what is already held, and losing the holding in the look.

Drawn as a changing line, the opening nine of Nourishment tells a querent that something already in their possession is being neglected because a neighbour appears to hold better. The verdict is unusually blunt, misfortune with none of the conditional escapes other lines attach, and the reason is not scarcity. The stroke is strong and correctly placed at the base of the lower trigram Zhen, so the person in this position is not short of means. They have simply stopped counting the means they have.

The practical content sits in the comparison the image describes. Watching another set of jaws move is a measurement of oneself against somebody else, and the discarded tortoise stands for whatever the querent has quietly written off as inadequate because it does not resemble what is being consumed across the way. A reading landing here is usually asking about an opportunity, a skill, or a relationship that looks poor only beside a chosen rival. The counsel is to name that abandoned thing plainly and go back to it, not to acquire a better version of whatever is being envied.

When this line changes, the lower trigram Zhen becomes Kun and the figure becomes Splitting Apart, King Wen 23. The transformation makes the warning concrete. The one firm stroke that was the querent's own capacity is gone, and what remains is a structure being worn away from underneath. Envy in this reading does not merely fail to feed. It removes the solid thing that was standing under the person indulging it.