The Wanderer

The fifty-sixth hexagram, Lu ("The Wanderer"), places Li (Fire) above Gen (Mountain). Fire on the mountain, burning quickly across the grass and moving on, gives the image of the traveler who does not stay, the stranger passing through. It follows Abundance in the King Wen order, since one who loses a great home may become a wanderer.

In the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary order devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi, this Lu stands 51st of 64, apart from its fifty-sixth position in the King Wen sequence traced above; it was this arrangement the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet sent from Beijing in 1701 to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who read its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of The Wanderer run yin, yin, yang, yang, yin, yang. 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 Dui over Xun, forming hexagram 28, Great Preponderance (Da Guo), 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 Wanderer's King Wen partner is hexagram 55, Abundance (Feng); 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, allows success in small matters and holds that perseverance brings good fortune to the wanderer, for a stranger in unfamiliar places must be reserved, correct and modest to fare well. The Image speaks of the superior person who is clear-minded and cautious in imposing penalties and does not protract lawsuits. The core theme is the condition of the traveler or outsider, transience met with caution and propriety. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

The core judgment behind this Lu 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 Wanderer (Lu), hexagram 56, is paired with its inversion: Abundance (Feng), hexagram 55. 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.