Standstill, Line 1

Standstill and its companion hexagram Peace open with the same image and take it in opposite directions. Legge's translation gives grass pulled up, bringing with it other stalks whose roots are connected, and promises good fortune and progress where the subject holds firm correctness. In Peace, that tangle of roots describes capable people drawing one another into service. Here, with heaven and earth already moving apart, it describes them withdrawing together, none of them going alone.

The small commentary refuses to let this read as a retreat from duty. It states that the mind of the line is bent on serving the ruler, which is the whole distinction the line turns on. Withdrawal at the start of a stagnant time is not an abandonment of responsibility but a recognition that responsibility cannot be discharged in present conditions, and that leaving in company preserves what will be needed when conditions change.

Yielding at the base of the lower trigram Kun, the line stands at the very beginning of the obstruction, before the closure has hardened and while movement is still cheap. The Great Symbolism tells the superior man to restrain the display of his virtue and avoid the calamities threatening him, adding that there is no opportunity for the glory of office. The first line is where that counsel is easiest to follow, and the good fortune promised to it belongs to acting early rather than to enduring well under pressure later.

Six at the beginning of Standstill advises a querent to withdraw now, and not alone. As a changing line it concerns the earliest recognition that a situation has closed, and its counsel is to step back while stepping back is still cheap, taking one's associates along rather than leaving them exposed. Firm correctness is the named condition of the good fortune, which distinguishes this from ordinary self-protection: the line is not deserting anything, it is preserving a capacity that present conditions cannot use.

Flipping this yielding stroke to firm turns the lower trigram Kun into Zhen, thunder, and heaven over thunder gives Innocence, King Wen 25, a hexagram about acting from unpremeditated correctness rather than from calculation. The transformation clarifies the first line's motive. What makes the withdrawal blameless is that it is not a maneuver, and the figure it produces is the one that names spontaneous rightness of intention as the whole basis of good fortune.

A reading landing here is favorable despite the unfavorable hexagram around it. The querent is counseled to read the closing situation accurately, to move early, to bring their people with them, and to keep their intentions plain. Innocence, in the figure this line produces, is not naivety but the absence of any hidden purpose, and it is what keeps an early withdrawal from becoming a defection.