In class it turns up copied into a notebook, hidden dragon, do not act, with a gloss the student has added underneath: so, wait. By email there is a question mark instead, and somewhere near it a job, a conversation, or money about to move.
The gloss is the problem. This is the first of six lines, and on its own it comes out wrong whichever way you turn it.
The seven statements
Received text, the Wang Bi line; my renderings.
Initial nine. The dragon lies hidden. Do not act. Nine in the second. The dragon appears in the field. Favourable to see the great man. Nine in the third. The noble one is active the whole day through; at evening still wary, as though in danger. No blame. Nine in the fourth. It may leap, and is still in the depths. No blame. Nine in the fifth. The dragon flies in the heavens. Favourable to see the great man. Nine at the top. The dragon overreaches. There is regret. Using nine. A host of dragons appears, without a head. Auspicious.
Read upward. A dragon lies hidden in deep water, comes up onto the ground where it can be seen, holds a wary position for a stretch, tests a leap, gets into the sky, then goes past the top of its arc. Six stages, one line. Most of the sixty-four hand you six loosely related snapshots instead. That is why the timing arguments keep coming back to this hexagram.
Line one is where readers come off the road
The character behind act is 用: to commit, to put into play, to spend. Reach for the ordinary modern sense of use and the line goes flat. Hidden is a position; the dragon under the water is the one that will later be in the sky. Read it as a verdict on the person, the common first pass, and the other five skew with it: the start of the sequence has quietly become wait.
What should you be doing while hidden? The core text says nothing. The Wenyan fills the gap: someone with the virtue of the dragon, in concealment, who does not bend to the age and is not troubled by going unrecognised. That is commentary written long afterwards; the two layers are the subject of What Kind of Book Is the Yi Jing, Actually?
Wu wei gets confused with this line every time I teach it. Wu wei is a question of method, not forcing things, not adding to the mess. This line is a question of timing, and it says nothing at all about how to move once you do. The two get filed together because both of them sound like a refusal. Separate piece here.
The second line
見 is read xiàn, to appear. The field is ground; what matters is that the thing is out of the water and can be seen.
Favourable to see the great man occurs twice in Qian, here and at the fifth line. Two and five correspond in position, and one reading takes the two occurrences as pointing at each other. Whether that is the original sense I would not say. Positions and correspondences have a piece of their own on this site.
The third line does the most work and gets the least
It is the only one of the six that names a person. The dragon drops out here and at the fourth line, though the fourth gives no subject at all.
Active the whole day through, still wary at evening as though in danger, and the verdict is no blame, which is not the same as auspicious. The Great Treatise glosses the phrase as being good at repairing a fault: an opening for something to go wrong, closed in time. The hardest-working line in the hexagram is paid in that.
Why. Position. Third sits at the top of the lower trigram and has not entered the upper one. The steps below are finished, the door above has not opened, and you are high up standing on nothing.
I have never got the punctuation of that line straight. The received text takes 夕惕若厲 as one phrase, wary as if in danger. Another reading pulls 厲 out as a judgment word in its own right, a common one meaning danger: at evening, wary. Danger. No blame. The danger becomes a fact rather than a comparison. Both get taught, I don’t know which is older, and I use the received one because a class needs a single version.
The fourth line
或 is the particle of the undecided. It may leap, and it is still in the depths.
Those depths are the same water the first line was hidden in. Fourth has crossed into the upper trigram, which changes nothing about what is underneath it. The line is a test: leap, drop back if it fails, no blame.
In the three-tier scheme, bottom two earth, middle two human, top two heaven, fourth stands at the top of the human place, at the doorway of heaven. So the statement does not commit, and opens with 或.
The fifth line
The dragon flies in the heavens. Position and timing have both arrived, and this is the comfortable one.
The top line, and why the verdict is regret
亢 means gone too high, past the point where there is room left.
Regret is lighter than misfortune here. The Great Treatise files regret and its neighbour under small flaws: looking back afterwards and knowing you should not have. The Wenyan glosses 亢 as knowing how to advance and not how to withdraw, seeing the gain and not the loss.
The animal itself is a translation problem. The English word drags in a hoard and somebody in armour coming to kill it, none of it near the Chinese creature, which is auspicious and belongs to water and weather. So the dragon appears in the field reads in English like a village being warned, when in the original it is good news. There has been a push in the Chinese press to write it loong instead. Whether that ever sticks I have no idea; it has not reached my classroom. I still lose a minute of each class to the word. Chinese readers meet these phrases first in martial-arts fiction, where the lines of Qian became the names of palm strikes. Not the worst way in.
Back to the top line. It states a rule inside the system: yang at the top turns to yin, the same event as old yang changing into its opposite in a cast, which Liuyao Divination: How a Single Question Gets Cast and Read covers. You can hang a moral about pride on top of that, and people do, but the moral is theirs and the rule sits underneath it either way. Nobody hands you the scale, though. How far along counts as 亢 the statement does not say, and neither can I; same complaint as in Yin and Yang Are Not Good and Bad.
Using nine
After the six lines the received text carries one more statement. Using nine: a host of dragons appears, without a head. Auspicious.
Qian is the only hexagram with this. Kun has a matching using six. The other sixty-two have none.
In modern Chinese, a host of dragons without a head is an idiom for a leaderless shambles. In the line statement it is auspicious.
There are two readings in circulation and they do not agree. One takes it as the statement used when all six lines change: six old yang, the whole thing turning into Kun, so you read this rather than any single line. The other takes it as a judgment on the hexagram entire, hardness carried so far it stops insisting on being first. I teach both. Asked to pick one I can’t, because neither set of reasons has ever convinced me.
Using it
The question at the end is always some version of: which line am I on.
It is a fair question with one condition attached. The six are stages on a single line, you are standing on one of them, and you don’t get a vote. Getting that wrong costs you either way. Mistaking the first line for the fifth is the common one, going up with nothing underneath. The other mistake happens too, less often, still waiting in the water long after the moment to move.
One boundary. I don’t use this hexagram to tell anyone whether their business will work. The statements give proportion inside a situation, and outcomes are not theirs to give. Casting is a separate procedure with its own rules, and I read as far as what to shore up. Anything touching business, law or money goes to an accountant, a lawyer or a licensed adviser.
So how do you locate yourself. What you can afford to lose, and how long you can wait. Then the one almost nobody sits down and works out: whether a bad move leaves you a second one. None of that is in the line statements. You do that part yourself.