The Well, Line 1

The first line of The Well (King Wen 48) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as a well so muddy that men will not drink from it, an old well to which no bird resorts. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns a town may be changed while the fashion of its wells is never changed, the well neither decreasing nor increasing, and all who come and go draw from it and are benefited, 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 Kan, water in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads water above wood; the superior man comforts the people and stimulates them to help one another, and the first line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Kan 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, A Well So Muddy No One Will Drink, 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 Well reads within the hexagram's overall concern with a town may be changed while the fashion of its wells is never changed, the well neither decreasing nor increasing, and all who come and go draw from it and are benefited. 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 a well so muddy that men will not drink from it, an old well to which no bird resorts, 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 do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. 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 Well turns Xun into Qian while the other trigram, Kan, stays as it is, which yields The Well's changing partner, Waiting (King Wen 5), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.