Zhun is the hexagram of the first difficulty. Water, the cloud full of rain, stands over thunder, the force stirring below, and the old readers saw the chaos of a beginning — the birth pangs of anything new. The judgment is oddly hopeful: difficulty at the beginning works supreme success, through perseverance. The trouble of starting, the text says, is not a sign that the venture is wrong; it is the price of bringing something into the world, and it rewards the one who keeps going without forcing a premature order.
Read against the working life, the figure is about the confusion that attends every first step. The third line, whoever hunts deer without the forester only loses his way in the forest, was the commentators' sharp counsel: at the start, do not act without a guide. The beginner who will not be shown the way wanders; the one who accepts help finds the path. The lines return again and again to horse and wagon parting — the early, expected friction between intention and means that a beginning always involves.
For the bonds between people, Zhun was read as the struggle that a new tie passes through before it holds. The second line is gentle: horse and wagon part, but he is not a robber — he wants to woo when the time comes. The commentators saw here the misreadings of an early relationship, when the other person's distance looks like rejection but is only hesitation. And the closing line, horse and wagon part, bloody tears flow, is the sober truth: some beginnings are bought with grief, and the tears are not the end but part of the price.
Within a cycle, this figure marks the very start, the stretch before order has formed when everything is tangled and nothing has yet settled. The image of water over thunder is the book's picture of a sky full of rain above a ground that stirs — the meeting of forces that have not yet arranged themselves. The counsel is to persist without forcing, to accept guidance, and to trust that the confusion of the beginning clears as the thing takes its shape.
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Cast the I Ching Oracle → Free · No sign-up · 3,000-year-old methodSource: Judgment and line texts follow the Wilhelm/Baynes rendering of the Yijing.