“Treading on the tail of a tiger”
I Ching“Treading on the tail of a tiger” is the central emblem of the hexagram Lî, an image of hazardous contact that makes conduct, rather than strength alone, decisive. Its paradox is that the tiger does not bite: danger is real, but progress and success remain possible when a person moves with propriety and caution. The six lines unfold the image into contrasting ways of proceeding, from an accustomed path and an easy one to overconfidence, apprehension, resolute peril, and, at the end, an examination of the whole course taken.
The Image and Its Meaning
The hexagram’s judgment presents a person treading on a tiger’s tail without being bitten, and associates that escape with progress and success. The commentary explains the image through the figure’s two trigrams: Tui represents a marsh, while Khien represents the sky and great strength. The marsh’s divided top line lies below the strong trigram, a configuration the commentator says can readily suggest the dangerous act of stepping on a tiger’s tail. The detail that the tiger does not bite is explained through Tui’s attribute of pleased satisfaction: someone already in the tiger’s jaws could not be described in that way. Coming out of danger unscathed therefore carries the image forward into the prospect of success.
That success is not presented as license to challenge danger. The commentary identifies the course represented by Lî as propriety—the observance of the rules of courtesy. Those rules function as stepping-stones across disorder and peril: they do not erase the hazardous setting, but offer a disciplined way to move through it. The tiger’s tail is thus both a concrete emblem of risk and a measure of whether action is governed by orderly conduct.
Six Ways of Treading
The line statements turn the general image into a sequence of judgments about conduct. The first line shows a person following an accustomed path; proceeding brings no error. The second offers a contrastingly level and easy path, occupied by a quiet, solitary person for whom firmness and correctness bring good fortune. The commentary connects that line’s position in the middle of its trigram to a straight, level path cut along a hillside or across difficult ground, while its lack of a proper correlate helps explain the figure’s solitude.
The third line supplies the sharpest reversal. Its subject is a one-eyed person who thinks he can see and a lame person who thinks he can walk well. He treads on the tiger’s tail and is bitten; the result is ill fortune. The commentary calls him a mere bravo acting the part of a great ruler. In this line, the peril does not reward daring: the subject’s false estimate of his capacity makes the dangerous step disastrous.
The fourth line returns to the tiger’s tail but changes the response. Its subject becomes full of apprehensive caution, and good fortune comes in the end. The fifth line, by contrast, has a resolute tread; firmness and correctness do not remove its peril. At the top of the sequence, the instruction is to look at the whole course already trodden and examine the presage it gives. If that course is complete and without failure, great good fortune follows. Read together, these lines distinguish untested confidence from caution, and momentary resolve from an assessment of conduct over time.
Conduct, Position, and Judgment
The image’s force lies in the difference between encountering danger and knowing how to act within it. The third line’s imagined ability—seeing well despite one eye, walking well despite lameness—sets self-deception against the fourth line’s alarmed care. The latter does not make the tiger harmless; instead, caution changes the outcome. The fifth line complicates any simple equation of firmness with safety: even a resolute person who is firm and correct remains in peril. Only the final line makes the entire course, rather than a single step or quality, the object of judgment.
The commentary also treats line position as part of how the image can be interpreted. In its account of the second line, a middle position evokes a level path, while the line’s relation to its correlate helps explain why its subject is solitary. More generally, the commentator stresses that a line’s significance varies with the name and subject of its hexagram. The image is therefore not a free-standing maxim about fear or courage; its meaning is shaped by the figure in which it appears and by the sequence of positions through which its advice unfolds.
From Symbol to Translation
The tiger image also illustrates a broader interpretive problem: how to render the compact symbolic language of the Yî intelligibly. The translator describes an early attempt to be as concise in English as the Chinese, producing passages with little or no visible syntactical connection. He later concludes that a literal version is not the solution. In his account, written Chinese characters are symbols of ideas, and their combination reflects what the writer thinks rather than simply transcribing what the writer would say. A translator must therefore enter into the author’s thought and express its meaning in another language as accurately and concisely as possible, sometimes supplying words that make implicit connections legible.
That approach informs the reading of Lî. The tiger, marsh, sky, strength, and courtesy are not treated as isolated labels; the commentator relates the configuration of the trigrams to the image, then relates the image to the line-by-line judgments. His explanation does not remove the text’s symbolic difficulty, but shows how a reading can move from figure to conduct: the tiger’s tail marks danger, the failure to be bitten makes successful passage conceivable, and propriety supplies the discipline by which that passage is understood.
