The Cauldron, Line 1

The first line of The Cauldron (King Wen 50) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the caldron overturned with its feet turned up, yet advantage in getting rid of what was bad inside it, as when a concubine is taken for the sake of her son. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns great progress and success, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the lowest place of the lower trigram Xun, wind in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Li, fire in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads wood entering into fire, the image of cooking; the superior man keeps every position correct and makes secure the appointment received from heaven, and the first line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Li above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Xun is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Caldron Overturned with its Feet Turned Up, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.

As a divinatory line, six at the first place of The Cauldron reads within the hexagram's overall concern with great progress and success. The line occupies a place that does not match its own nature in the classical doctrine that odd places favour a firm, yang line and even places favour a yielding, yin line. Its own text, that the caldron overturned with its feet turned up, yet advantage in getting rid of what was bad inside it, as when a concubine is taken for the sake of her son, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The first line corresponds by classical convention with the fourth line, and the two correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Xun in the lower position of the figure, the line marks the opening of the situation, before the trigram above it has any part in the reading, one stage in the six stage movement the hexagram traces from its first line to its last.

A change at this line, from yin to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the first line of The Cauldron turns Xun into Qian while the other trigram, Li, stays as it is, which yields The Cauldron's changing partner, Great Possession (King Wen 14), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.