Biting Through addresses the situation where something is stuck and will not come loose on its own. The image is biting through a hard mouthful: there is an obstruction, and it has to be dealt with directly.
The structure: Fire over Thunder
Thunder below, fire above — movement and clarity together. That combination is what makes decisive action possible here rather than merely aggressive.
The Judgment
Biting Through has success. It furthers one to use obstacles deliberately.
The second sentence is the distinctive one. Obstacles are not just things to remove; they are what gives an action definition. The text treats them as useful.
The Image
Thunder and lightning: the image of Biting Through. Thus the kings of former times made firm the laws and promulgated penalties.
The remedy is structural rather than personal. Clear rules remove most of the need for repeated force.
The lines
- Line 1 — His feet are fastened in the stocks, so that his toes disappear. No blame.
- Line 2 — Bites through tender meat, so that his nose disappears. No blame.
- Line 3 — Bites on old dried meat and strikes something hard and poisonous. Slight humiliation. No blame.
- Line 4 — Bites on dried gristly meat. Receives a metal arrow. Perseverance brings good fortune.
- Line 5 — Bites on dried lean meat. Receives yellow gold. Perseveringly aware of danger. No blame.
- Line 6 — His neck is fastened in the wooden cangue, so that his ears disappear. Misfortune.
The sequence runs from tender to dried to gristly: the obstruction gets harder as you go, and the lines describe escalating effort rather than escalating force. Line 6 is where the obstruction has become the situation.
How to read it
This is one of the few hexagrams that explicitly endorses decisive action, so the caution is different from usual: the risk is not acting too slowly but acting when the obstruction is still soft enough to dissolve on its own.
The Image supplies the better long-term answer. Fix the structure once rather than the symptom repeatedly.
Why the lines describe food
The sequence of mouthfuls is doing more than decoration. Tender meat is easy, dried meat harder, gristly meat hardest — the image tracks how much resistance the obstruction offers at each stage.
The metal arrow in line 4 and the yellow gold in line 5 are the rewards for not stopping partway.
When not to bite
Line 1 shows restraint at the first sign of trouble, and line 3 shows the cost of pushing into something resistant. The hexagram favours decisive action, but not premature action.
The test is whether the obstruction is actually blocking you, or merely inconvenient.