The Army

The seventh hexagram, Shi ("The Army"), places the trigram Kun (Earth) above Kan (Water). Water hidden within the earth is the image of a great mass concealed and held ready, like an army mustered among the people. It follows Conflict in the King Wen sequence, a natural pairing since disputes may harden into organized force.

Shi also holds a place in the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary ordering devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi: 48th of 64, quite apart from its seventh position in the King Wen sequence above. It was this Fu Xi ordering that the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet sent from Beijing in 1701 to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who recognized its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of The Army run yin, yang, yin, yin, yin, yin. A later interpretive layer absent from the original Zhou Yi, the nuclear hexagram (hu gua), treats lines two through four as a lower trigram and lines three through five as an upper one; here they combine as Kun over Zhen, forming hexagram 24, Return (Fu), a hidden figure first associated with the Han-dynasty scholar Jing Fang, whose Yijing commentary of the first century BCE is credited with the earliest appearance of nuclear trigrams. The Army's King Wen partner is hexagram 8, Holding Together (Bi); most of the sixty-four pair this way, related by turning the whole figure upside down, while the eight hexagrams built from a single doubled trigram pair instead by inverting every line. Mawangdui (1973) orders hexagrams by trigram, not King Wen; names here follow Wilhelm and Baynes, 1950, not Legge, 1882.

The Judgment, in paraphrase, holds that an army requires perseverance and a seasoned, disciplined leader; under such leadership there is good fortune and no blame. The Image likens the superior person to one who, like the earth holding water, nourishes the people and gathers a following. The core theme is disciplined collective effort under legitimate command. Lines received as moving lines change into their opposites and generate a second, related hexagram that modifies the counsel.

The core judgment behind Shi belongs to the Zhou Yi, a Western Zhou divination record that Edward Shaughnessy and other scholars now place around the late ninth century BCE, centuries before the Ten Wings commentary layered onto it added the Image and the language of the superior person quoted above. Wang Bi's influential third-century commentary, part of the received Zhouyi zhu, read the resulting text as philosophy rather than as a network of trigram correlations, a stance that shaped how it has been transmitted ever since. In the King Wen sequence, The Army (Shi), hexagram 7, is paired with its inversion: Holding Together (Bi), hexagram 8. Translations of the Judgment above vary by tradition: Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German rendering, carried into English by Cary Baynes for the 1950 Bollingen edition, gives the text a mystical, aphoristic cast that shaped most twentieth-century readers' sense of the book, while James Legge's earlier and more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads the same lines closer to a historical record than a philosophical one.