The Abysmal, Line 1

The Abysmal opens by going further down. Legge's translation describes the subject in the double defile entering a cavern within it, and gives evil, while the commentary on the image observes that he has lost his way. The hexagram is the trigram of water and peril set on top of itself, so danger here is not an incident but a condition already doubled before the first line speaks. What this line adds is depth. A pit is bad, and a cavern opening off the floor of a pit is where somebody stops being able to see the sky at all.

The stroke is yielding in an odd place, which the ordinary rule counts as incorrect, and it stands at the very bottom of the lower trigram Kan with nothing firm beneath it. In the trigram itself the single strong line lies in the middle, held between two soft ones, which is the classical picture of a firm heart inside a yielding situation. This line is not that strong stroke. It is the soft ground under it, and the reading is that the position has no resource of its own and has not yet reached the one line that does.

The Great Symbolism reads the doubled trigram as water flowing on without pause, and draws from it the counsel that a person maintain constancy of heart and integrity of conduct and go on with the work of teaching. None of that has begun here. This opening line describes the entry into difficulty made before any of it is in place, which is why the verdict comes without qualification.

Six at the beginning is one of the least hopeful lines in the classic, and its bluntness is the point rather than a rhetorical effect. A pit inside a pit describes a querent who has not merely met difficulty but has gone deeper into it while searching for the way out, and the commentary's remark that the way has been lost is the practical content. The reading concerns disorientation more than damage. Somebody drawing this line usually cannot yet tell which of the things around them is the problem.

The position gives the reason. A yielding stroke in an odd place has no strength of its own, and it sits on the floor of the lower trigram Kan, below the one firm line in that trigram rather than at it. In a hexagram whose whole teaching is that danger is survived by keeping an inner firmness while the outer situation stays perilous, this line is beneath the level at which any such firmness has been found. There is nothing here to hold on to and no useful action available.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Kan becomes Dui and the figure becomes Limitation, King Wen 60, in which a boundary is deliberately set and then kept. Read from the bottom of a double pit, that destination is the first genuinely useful instruction the situation admits. What ends the deepening is not an escape but a limit, drawn at whatever depth the querent happens to be standing.