屯 Difficulty at the Beginning
Upper trigram: Water (water) · Lower trigram: Thunder (thunder)
Birth pangs — chaos before order, the messiness of all new beginnings.
Modern interpretation
New beginnings are messy by nature; the confusion is the growing, not the failing. Do not force clarity yet — gather allies, stay humble, and take small steady steps. Order will emerge if you do not panic.
The Judgment · 卦辞
元亨，利贞。勿用有攸往。利建侯。
“Kun (indicates that in the case which it presupposes) there will be great progress and success, and the advantage will come from being correct and firm. (But) any movement in advance should not be (lightly) undertaken. There will be advantage in appointing feudal princes.” — James Legge, The Yî King (1882)
The six lines · 爻辞
Read from the bottom line upward. Each line pairs the received Chinese text with Legge's English translation.
磐桓，利居贞。利建侯。
“The first line, undivided, shows the difficulty (its subject has) in advancing. It will be advantageous for him to abide correct and firm; advantageous (also) to be made a feudal ruler.”
屯如邅如，乘马班如。匪寇，婚媾。女子贞不字，十年乃字。
“The second line, divided, shows (its subject) distressed and obliged to return; (even) the horses of her chariot (also) seem to be retreating. (But) not by a spoiler (is she assailed), but by one who seeks her to be his wife. The young lady maintains her firm correctness, and declines a union. After ten years she will be united, and have children.”
即鹿无虞，惟入于林中，君子几不如舍，往吝。
“The third line, divided, shows one following the deer without (the guidance of) the forester, and only finding himself in the midst of the forest. The superior man, acquainted with the secret risks, thinks it better to give up the chase. If he went forward, he would regret it.”
乘马班如，求婚媾。往吉，无不利。
“The fourth line, divided, shows (its subject as a lady), the horses of whose chariot appear in retreat. She seeks, however, (the help of) him who seeks her to be his wife. Advance will be fortunate; all will turn out advantageously.”
屯其膏，小，贞吉；大，贞凶。
“The fifth line, undivided, shows the difficulties in the way of (its subject's) dispensing the rich favours that might be expected from him. With firmness and correctness there will be good fortune in small things; (even) with them in great things there will be evil.”
乘马班如，泣血涟如。
“The topmost line, divided, shows (its subject) with the horses of his chariot obliged to retreat, and weeping tears of blood in streams.”
About changing lines
In a real I Ching reading, hexagrams are built by casting coins or yarrow stalks six times, bottom line first. Some lines come out “old” (unstable) — an old yin or old yang flips into its opposite, producing a second hexagram that shows where the situation is heading. The changing lines are the moving parts of your answer: read their individual line statements above, and they point to the direction of change.
Ask a question and cast the coins — free, with a plain-English interpretation grounded in the classical text.
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