The Book of Changes · Zhun

Hexagram 3: Difficulty at the Beginning

Water (the gorge and the deep) over Thunder (the storm arriving)

The hard start. Thunder under water is the first movement inside danger, and the tradition reads the confusion as ordinary rather than as a warning: blades of grass push through hard ground.

The image

Sprouting, tangled. The image is a person sorting threads, putting the chaos in order strand by strand instead of pulling.

Water, above

Danger, depth, and what has to be gone through.

Thunder, below

Shock, beginning, and movement that starts below.

The six lines

Read from the bottom up.

1. Line 1Hesitation is right. Look for people who know the ground before moving on it.
2. Line 2Held up, and the delay is not refusal. What is declined now can be accepted later.
3. Line 3Hunting with no guide, deeper into the wood. Going on alone is the mistake available here.
4. Line 4Help is there if it is asked for. Asking is the whole of the difficulty.
5. Line 5Give small and it lands. Give large too early and it is misread.
6. Line 6Stuck and weeping. When effort has stopped working, stopping is the move.

The same figure in Human Design

Human Design took its sixty four gates from this book, in this numbering, so hexagram 3 is Gate 3, Ordering.