The Family — 家人

What Is Hexagram 37?

Hexagram 37, Jiā Rén (家人), The Family, is Fire below and Wind above, ䷤ — the household as the smallest complete unit of a human order: three characters of judgment, 利女貞, asking for one thing done inside a house rather than out in the world. The figure hands out 吉 in five of its six lines and contains no 凶 and no 咎 anywhere at all.

The 序卦 arrives here from the figure before it, 傷於外者，必反其家，故受之以家人 — whoever is hurt abroad has to come back to his own house, and so comes the Family. It leaves by the opposite door, 家道窮必乖，故受之以睽；睽者乖也 — when the way of a house runs out, people go apart, and so comes 睽, which means to diverge. The 雜卦 puts the pair into one breath, 睽外也，家人內也: 睽 is the outside, the Family is the inside.

The 疏 opens by defining the name from its function rather than its picture: 明家內之道，正一家之人，故謂之「家人」 — to make plain the way of things inside a house and to set the people of one house right, and that is why it is called the Family. There is no image of fire and wind in that sentence and no cosmology in it. The figure is named for what it does to the people in it.

What follows in Wang Bi's note on the judgment is the strangest thing on the page, and it is a deliberate narrowing: 家人之義，各自脩一家之道，不能知家外他人之事也。統而論之，非元亨利君子之貞，故「利女貞」。其正在家內而巳. The way of the Family is that each person tends the way of his own house and cannot know the affairs of people outside it; taken as a whole this is not the 元亨利貞 that belongs to a noble man — not the great passage, not what serves, not his kind of correctness — and so the judgment claims the one thing it can stand behind: 利女貞, what serves is the woman's steadiness. Its correctness is confined to the inside of the house. The 疏 says the same in words that are plainer still, 既修家內之道，不能知家外他人之事。統而論之，非君子丈夫之正，故但言「利女貞」: a person tending the inside of a house does not know what is going on in anyone else's, and since the judgment cannot claim the width of a noble man's correctness it claims only this much.

The book does that in very few places. The judgment here is three characters — the same three as the figure immediately before it, and against eleven in the figure before that one — and it is one of the small number that names a single half of the pair and then stops. A reader who comes to 家人 expecting the usual imperial opening will not find one. What the figure is willing to promise has been limited on purpose to the thing it is actually about.

The geometry does part of the argument here, so it needs setting out. This is 離下巽上: 離, Fire, takes the lower half and 巽, Wind, the upper, ䷤, four firm lines and two yielding ones, alternating all the way up except at the very top. Read the six places against the rule that a firm line belongs in an odd place and a yielding one in an even place, and the first five lines all stand where they belong; 上九 is the only one out of place. Read the same strokes from the top down and they make Hexagram 38, 睽, Opposition. Take each line as the opposite of what it is and they make Hexagram 40, 解, Deliverance. The figure that the sequence sends a wounded man home to inverts into the figure of a house coming apart, and by line into the figure of a knot working loose.

Across the judgment and the six lines there is exactly one 吝 and two 悔, no 凶 anywhere and no 咎 anywhere, and 吉 on five of the six lines: 貞吉 on the second, 吉 on the third, 大吉 on the fourth, 吉 on the fifth, 終吉 on the top, with only the first line doing without it. The book is not shy about 凶 elsewhere; it uses the word freely in other figures' line texts. Here the word appears nowhere. The book is not promising that families go well. It is saying that in this figure the outcomes have already been decided by conduct inside the house before anything outside gets a vote.

Trigram Structure

Fire, 離, holds the bottom of the figure and Wind, 巽, the top. The 說卦's one-word summaries are 巽，入也…離，麗也, Wind as that which enters and Fire as that which attaches, and the two together describe a household fairly exactly: something that gets in, and something that stays lit only by holding on to what it burns.

Both trigrams are daughters, and the 說卦's list of the eight children says which ones: 巽一索而得女，故謂之長女；離再索而得女，故謂之中女 — at the first exchange a daughter is obtained and she is the eldest; at the second, another, and she is the middle one. Elder daughter above, middle daughter below. The figure is built entirely out of the female half of a family, which is why the 彖 opens on the woman, and Wang Bi's note on that opening is a piece of bookkeeping rather than commentary, 家人之義，以內為本，故先說女也: the meaning of the Family takes the inside as its root, and so the woman is mentioned first.

The 說卦's longer inventory gives 巽 the tools of a workshop: 巽為木、為風、為長女、為繩直、為工、為白、為長、為高、為進退、為不果、為臭 — wood, wind, the eldest daughter, the plumb line, the craftsman, white, length, height, going forward and back, indecision, smell. Two entries in that list do work on this page. 繩直 is the cord a builder stretches to check a line, and 工 is the one who holds it. The Image's business is 行有恆, conduct with a constant in it, and the trigram that supplies this household with its method is the trigram of the stretched cord. The same list's 為進退、為不果 is the other side of Wind, the tendency to go partway and stop, and it is one reason a house needs a standard that comes from somewhere other than the mood of the moment.

Fire's own list opens on four entries that are all light, 離為火、為日、為電、為中女, before it turns to armor and weapons. Nothing in the upper trigram is light, and nothing in the lower one is anything but light; the household's clarity sits at the bottom of the figure, in the place where the actual work of a house gets done.

The Image turns on how the two trigrams pass into each other, and the 疏 draws the circle in four sentences, 巽在離外，是風從火出。火出之初，因風方熾。火既炎盛，還復生風。內外相成，有似家人之義. Wind stands outside Fire, which is to say wind comes out of fire. At the start, the fire only grows because wind feeds it. Once the fire is strong, it makes the wind. Each is inside the other's making, from the inside out, and that is what a house looks like. Wang Bi's note is one clause shorter and no less exact, 由內以相成熾也: each grown hot by the other, and grown from within.

The 說卦's chapter on the eight directions puts Wind in the southeast, and the verb it uses there for Wind's office is the one to keep: 齊乎巽，巽，東南也，齊也者，言萬物之潔齊也. 齊 is the word for things brought to the same level. The trigram in this figure that brings things to the same level is the one standing over the household, and the Image's 恆, the constant course, is what does the leveling.

The 繫辭上 supplies the sentence the Image is built on, and it is not a metaphor about houses at all: 言出乎身加乎民；行發乎邇見乎遠。言行，君子之樞機；樞機之發，榮辱之主也. Words come out of the self and land on other people; conduct starts up close and is seen far away; words and conduct are the noble one's hinge and trigger, and what the trigger releases is the master of honor and disgrace. The 疏 on this figure's Image quotes the phrase directly, 言之與行，君子樞機, and then draws the conclusion the Image draws, 出身加人，發邇化遠，故舉言行以為之誡: it comes out of a person and lands on others, it starts nearby and changes things far off, which is why the Image takes words and conduct as its warning. A house is where that hinge works at its shortest distance.

The Judgment

家人：利女貞。

Jiā Rén: lì nǚ zhēn.

Our rendering: The Family: what serves is the steadiness of the woman.

Read character by character:

Three characters, and Wang Bi's note on them is about scope rather than content: 非元亨利君子之貞，故「利女貞」。其正在家內而巳. What is being claimed is not the great passage and not a noble man's correctness; it is correctness inside a house, said in a form that makes no claim beyond that. The 疏 spells out why the judgment cannot be wider, 既修家內之道，不能知家外他人之事, and then adds the phrase that everyone who has run a household will recognize, 非君子丈夫之正: this is not the correctness of a noble man or of a man of the world.

The 彖 then opens the judgment back up, and the first thing it does is point at two places in the diagram. 家人，女正位乎內，男正位乎外，男女正，天地之大義也 — the woman correct in her place inside, the man correct in his place outside, and the correctness of the two of them is the great principle of heaven and earth. Wang Bi's notes on the two halves are three characters each, 謂二也 and 謂五也: the woman in her correct place inside is the second line, the man in his correct place outside is the fifth. Everything the 彖 says afterwards rests on those two positions being central and correct at the same time, which the geometry of the figure has already established. The 疏 restates it as a rule of construction, 家人之道，必須女主於內，男主於外，然後家道乃立 — the way of a Family requires the woman to hold the inside and the man to hold the outside, and only then does the way of the house stand.

Then the 彖 does something no other judgment does at this length. It lists the household's relations one by one, 父父，子子，兄兄，弟弟，夫夫，婦婦，而家道正 — and each term is used twice, once as a noun and once as its own verb. To be a father is to father; to be a son is to son; elder brother, younger brother, husband, wife, each standing first for a relation and then for the act of keeping it. The 疏 reads the doubling as a statement about order rather than about affection, 父不失父道，乃至婦不失婦道，尊卑有序，上下不失，而後為家道之正: father does not lose the way of a father, down as far as wife not losing the way of a wife, the ranks in order and the places above and below each kept, and only then is the way of the house correct.

Two more clauses finish the 彖. 家人有嚴君焉，父母之謂也 — the Family has within it a 嚴君, a stern ruler, and that is what is meant by father and mother; the 疏 explains that parents are a household's head, honored as a state honors its ruler. And then the claim the whole figure was arranged to support: 正家而天下定矣. The 疏 refuses to let this stay rhetorical, 各正其家，無家不正，即天下之治定矣: if each house is set right, and no house is not, then the ordering of the whole world is settled. It is the book's shortest theory of politics and there is no state anywhere in it.

Jungian reading: Jung's observation is the one to keep beside this judgment — that nothing has a stronger influence on those around a person, and especially on children, than the unlived life of the parent. The 彖's list is the other half of the same observation. Every one of those doubled words is a relation with an act inside it, and what damages a house is what happens when the act goes missing while the name is still being used. Jung also held, all his working life, that the first task of anyone becoming a person is to separate from the unconscious of their family without pretending they did not come from it, and the judgment's confinement of its own promise to 家內 says the same thing from the other end. What a person can be correct about is the house they are actually in. The rest of the world was never in the promise.

The Image

風自火出，家人；君子以言有物，而行有恆。

Fēng zì huǒ chū, Jiā Rén; jūn zǐ yǐ yán yǒu wù, ér xíng yǒu héng.

Our rendering: Wind comes out of fire: the Family. The noble one therefore gives his words weight and his conduct constancy.

Wang Bi's note on the picture is the same circle the 疏 draws out at length, 由內以相成熾也, each made hot by the other and made that way from the inside. On the second half he is unusually specific about what the noble one is doing, and it is a warning about audience: 家人之道，脩於近小而不妄也。故君子以言必有物而口無擇言，行必有恆而身無擇行. The way of the Family is practiced in what is near and small and does not run to the fanciful; so the noble one makes sure his words have something in them, which is why his mouth has no picked-over speech, and his conduct has a constant in it, which is why his person has no picked-over conduct. 擇 is the operative character in both halves — to pick over, to select, to choose the version that suits the room. A person whose words have nothing in them has to select every one of them; a person whose conduct has no constant has to decide it again every morning.

The 疏 unpacks the two characters the sentence turns on: 物，事也. 物 here means matters, things that are the case, not objects — 言必有事，即口無擇言, if what is said has a matter behind it, then nothing has to be chosen; and on the second half, 行必有常，即身無擇行. It then gives the reason a hexagram about houses bothers with either: 正家之義，修於近小。言之與行，君子樞機。出身加人，發邇化遠，故舉言行以為之誡 — the way of setting a house right is practiced in what is near and small, words and conduct are the noble one's hinge and trigger, they come out of a person and reach others and start nearby and change what is far, and that is why the Image takes them as its warning. The sentence that closes the passage is a small reading rule for the whole line, 發言立行，皆須合於可常之事，互而相足也: what is said and what is done both have to be able to bear being repeated, and each of the two completes the other.

The 繫辭上 has the source sentence, already quoted above in the section on the trigrams, and what it adds to this page is a location. 言出乎身加乎民；行發乎邇見乎遠. Words leave a body and arrive at other people; conduct begins within arm's reach and is seen at a distance. In a house the distance is close to zero. The same words and the same conduct are being watched by the people who watch them every day, and the 恆 the Image asks for is what can survive that.

Jungian reading: the Image's claim is that a household runs on conduct rather than on instruction, and Jung's account of family influence arrives at the same place from the other direction. Parents do not hand their lives to their children. They hand over what was and was not done with those lives, and a great deal of that gets transmitted without a sentence being spoken about it. The Image's 物 in the words and 恆 in the conduct is the same transmission written as an instruction, and the 疏's 口無擇言 is its practical form. Where there is no audience left to perform for, either the words have something in them or the silence does.

The Lines

初九：閑有家，悔亡。 (Xián yǒu jiā, huǐ wáng.) Fencing the house at the outset: regret is gone.

Wang Bi puts the whole line in its first clause: 凡教在初而法在始，家瀆而後嚴之，志變而後治之，則「悔」矣. Instruction belongs at the start and rules belong at the beginning; a house that has already gone slack and is only then made strict, intentions that have already shifted and are only then brought to order, are what produce regret. He then places the line, 處家人之初，為家人之始，故宜必以「閑有家」，然後「悔亡」也: standing at the very first place, at the beginning of the Family, the right move can only be to bar the house before anything has to be corrected, and only then is regret gone.

The 疏 gives the actual advice, 治家之道，在初即須嚴正，立法防閑。若黷亂之後，方始治之，即有悔矣 — the way of running a house has to be strict and correct from the beginning, setting the rule and closing the door against things early; once matters have become muddled, taking them in hand afterwards is what regret consists of. 閑 is the character for a door with a bar across it, and the 疏's 立法防閑 keeps the physical sense alive. The Small Says give the reason a fence is possible at all, 閑有家，志未變也, and the 疏's gloss is the part that matters, 家人志未變黷也: the household's intentions have not yet been muddied.

The first line of a hexagram is usually about what has not happened yet, and this one is exact about the timing it wants. Nothing in it is about severity; the word 嗃嗃, the sound of scolding, does not appear until the third line. What it asks for is the fence while the intentions are still clean, which is the only moment it can go up without anyone having to be told they were wrong.

六二：無攸遂，在中饋，貞吉。 (Wú yōu suì, zài zhōng kuì, zhēn jí.) Nothing pressed through on her own account; her place is the cooking fire and the offerings within. Holding to this: good fortune.

Wang Bi's note reads the line's position as its whole content: 居內處中，履得其位，以陰應陽，盡婦人之正，義無所必，遂職乎「中饋」，巽順而巳，是以「貞吉」也. It is placed inside and holds the middle, it stands where it belongs, and being yielding it answers the firm; that is the whole of a woman's correctness — 義無所必, nothing that it must have, nothing insisted on — and its office is 中饋, the food prepared and offered in a house, and nothing beyond a compliant willingness. The 疏 is plainer still, 婦人之道，巽順為常，無所必遂。其所職主，在於家中饋食供祭而已: the way of a woman takes compliance as its ordinary and presses nothing to completion, and what it has charge of is the feeding and the offerings inside the house.

The 彖 had already named this line, 女正位乎內，謂二也, and this is where the naming lands. The two words carrying the line are negative ones and they are the ones to keep: 無攸遂, nothing forced through, and 無所必, nothing that must be. The Small Says reduce the whole thing to four characters, 順以巽也, and the 疏 reads them as a description of how the good fortune was obtained rather than as a compliment, 明其以柔居中而得正位，故能順以巽而獲吉也: it is yielding and holds the center and stands in the correct place, and being so placed it can be compliant and by that be fortunate.

A modern reader will want to ask why the figure puts a woman here and stops, and the honest answer is that the book comes from a world with one arrangement of a house in it. What is worth taking from the line is the mechanism underneath the arrangement, and the mechanism is not gendered at all. 無攸遂 is the discipline of running the inside of something — the accounts, the food, the people, the next three weeks — with no agenda of your own being pushed through it, and it is the same discipline in a household, a small business, or a back office. The line is not asking anyone to be small. It is asking that the position not be used to press something through, and it awards 貞吉 to the person who can hold that.

九三：家人嗃嗃，悔厲吉；婦子嘻嘻，終吝。 (Jiā rén hè hè, huǐ lì jí; fù zǐ xī xī, zhōng lìn.) The household loud with scolding: regret and peril — and good fortune. Wife and children giggling: in the end, a lasting stain.

Wang Bi puts the line at the head of a house and then gives the sentence the whole tradition quotes: 以陽處陽，剛嚴者也。處下體之極，為一家之長者也。行與其慢，寧過乎恭；家與其瀆，甯過乎嚴. It is firm in a firm place, which is to say hard and strict; it stands at the top of the lower trigram, which is to say it is the head of the household; and then the preference: in conduct, rather than slackness, better to overshoot toward respect; in a house, rather than letting it go slack, better to overshoot toward strictness. From that he reads both halves of the line, 是以家人雖「嗃嗃悔厲」，猶得其道。「婦子嘻嘻」，乃失其節也: even with the house in an uproar of scolding, with regret and with peril, the way is still being kept; it is the giggling that loses the household's measure.

The 疏 defines the two sounds and then reads the line as one scene with a verdict on each half: 嗃嗃，嚴酷之意也。嘻嘻，喜笑之貌也 — 嗃嗃 is the sense of harsh severity, 嘻嘻 the look of laughing and smiling; and 雖復嗃嗃傷猛，悔其酷厲，猶保其吉…若縱其婦子慢黷嘻嘻，喜笑而無節，則終有恨辱. Even if the scolding is harsh enough to wound and the severity is regretted, the good fortune is kept; let the wife and children go slack and laugh with no measure, and the end of it is resentment and disgrace. The Small Says give each half of the line its own verdict, 家人嗃嗃，未失也。婦子嘻嘻，失家節也, and the load-bearing phrase is 失家節 — not too much laughing, but a lost measure.

This is the only line in the figure carrying both a 吉 and a 吝, and the wedge between them is drawn in the Small Says rather than in the line text. The severe house has not lost anything; the slack house has lost its 節, its measure. Wang Bi's sentence has often been read as a license for harshness, and the Small Says do not quite give one — what they commend is 未失, not severity, and what they condemn is 失家節, not levity. The house where nothing is ever pressing and nothing is ever at stake is the one the figure marks, and it marks it with 吝, a verdict short of 凶.

六四：富家，大吉。 (Fù jiā, dà jí.) Enriching the house: great good fortune.

Wang Bi's note turns on the line and not on the money: 能以其富順而處位，故「大吉」也。若但能富其家，何足為大吉. It can take what it has and put it in the service of a compliant position, and that is the great good fortune; if all it could do were to enrich its house, that would not be worth calling great. He then says what the position is, 體柔居巽，履得其位，明於家道，以近至尊，能富其家也: yielding by nature, sitting in Wind, standing where it belongs, clear about the way of a house, and placed near the one above it, which is how it is able to enrich the house at all. The 疏 refuses to let 富 mean money, 富謂祿位昌盛也 — 富 means rank and income at their height — and then restates the position as the method, 六四體柔處巽，得位承五，能富其家者也: it is yielding, sits in Wind, stands correctly, and carries the fifth place, and by that it enriches the house.

The Small Says name the reason in four characters, 順在位也 — in the right place, and compliant — and the 疏 explains what the compliance buys, 由順承於君而在臣位，故不見黜奪也: because it complies with the one above and stays in the subordinate place, it is not dismissed or stripped of what it holds. The figure's single 大吉 sits on this line, and it belongs to a line whose wealth is described entirely as a function of where it stands relative to the ruler. The figure is consistent about this from the judgment onward: what makes a house rich is position held correctly over time, and what leaves it poor is the same thing held badly.

九五：王假有家，勿恤。吉。 (Wáng gé yǒu jiā, wù xù. Jí.) The king arrives at the house: nothing to be anxious over. Good fortune.

The 彖 had already pointed here, 男正位乎外，謂五也, and this line is what happens when that place is filled properly. Wang Bi begins with the character — 假，至也, 假 means to arrive at — and then the line's structure, 履正而應，處尊體巽，王至斯道，以有其家者也: it stands correct and has a counterpart, it holds the honored place and is yielding by nature, and a king who arrives at this way of doing things is a king who has his house. Then the claim the whole figure has been building toward, 居於尊位，而明於家道，則下莫不化矣: someone in the highest place who understands the way of a house finds that nothing below him fails to be changed by it. Wang Bi then quotes the 彖's own list back into the line, 父父、子子、兄兄、弟弟、夫夫、婦婦，六親和睦交相愛樂而家道正，「正家而天下定矣」, and closes on the advice, 故「王假有家」，則勿恤而吉: arrive at this and there is nothing left to be anxious about.

The 疏 keeps the social reading and makes it specific, 能以尊貴巽接於物，王至此道，以有其家: a king who can meet things from his height with the compliance of Wind is a king who has arrived at this way and so has his house. The Small Says name it in four characters, 交相愛也 — they love one another in return — and the 疏 expands them without embarrassment, 六親和睦，交相愛樂也: the six relations at peace and glad of one another.

The fifth line is the 彖's 男正位乎外 in person, and it is worth noticing what the Small Says actually say about it. Nothing in it is obedience. The image the book reaches for when it wants to describe a house ordered from the top is 交相愛, love running both ways, and the 彖's political claim, 正家而天下定矣, is attached to that and not to enforcement. 勿恤 is the line's actual counsel: the anxiety to be dropped is not about the household's conduct but about whether the king's position will hold if he meets his own house with compliance rather than with command.

上九：有孚威如，終吉。 (Yǒu fú wēi rú, zhōng jí.) There is trust, and there is weight about him: in the end, good fortune.

This is the only line in the figure standing in a place its kind does not belong to — a firm line in the sixth, an even and yielding place — and it is the line that closes the hexagram with 終吉. Wang Bi reads it as the last thing a house produces: 處家人之終，居家道之成，「刑于寡妻」，以著於外者也，故曰「有孚」. It stands at the end of the Family and at the completion of the way of a house, and the phrase he reaches for is from the 詩經, 刑于寡妻，以著於外者也 — the line from 《思齊》 that runs 刑于寡妻，至于兄弟，以御于家邦: a man giving his wife a model, reaching his brothers, and by that governing his house and his country. The trust in this line is what a completed house gives off, and it shows on the outside.

Then the sentence worth keeping from the rest of the note: 凡物以猛為本者則患在寡恩，以愛為本者則患在寡威，故家人之道尚威嚴也。家道可終，唯信與威. Anything founded on hardness has its failure in a shortage of kindness; anything founded on love has its failure in a shortage of weight; and so the way of a house is at its best when there is authority in it. The one thing that can carry a house to its end is trust together with weight. He then gives the mechanism, 身得威敬，人亦如之。反之於身，則知施於人也: when a person is held in respect himself he knows how respect is given, and by turning that back on himself he knows how to give it out.

The 疏 follows the same track and ends on the reflexive character, 上九處家人之終，家道大成，「刑于寡妻」，以著於外，信行天下，故曰「有孚」也。威被海內，故曰「威如」 — it stands at the end of the Family and the way of the house comes to full growth; the model given to the wife shows abroad and trust runs through the world, which is the 有孚; the awe reaches the four seas, which is the 威如. The Small Says close on the phrase to keep, 反身之謂也 — it means turning back on oneself — and the 疏 turns them over carefully, 身得人敬則敬於人…反之於身則知施之於人: the weight in this line is not applied to other people but reversed onto the one holding it. The last line of a figure about houses, built out of daughters, arrived at from a wound abroad, turns out to be about looking back at yourself.

The figure's one structural irregularity is here too, and it belongs beside the ending. Five lines in this hexagram stand exactly where their kind belongs and the sixth does not, and the sixth is the one that gets 終吉 while the other five get 吉 of various sizes. The book does not tidy that away. What the line has instead of a correct place is 孚 and 威, trust and weight, and what it has instead of an instruction is 反身.

Daily Life

The subject of this hexagram is a plural, and that is the first thing it asks a reader to notice. Nothing in 家人 can be done alone, and nothing in it can be resigned from cleanly — the order of the 序卦 makes the point by sending a hurt man home, 傷於外者，必反其家, because the house is what is left when the rest of the arrangement has failed. It is the one group most people are in that they did not choose, and 13 同人, the figure for fellowship, is the other kind: a bond made by liking. The two are worth holding side by side, because the conduct each asks for is not the same. In a chosen company you can leave; in a house the permanence is the point, and it is what makes the conduct in it real rather than provisional.

The Image is where this becomes usable, and it is a small claim rather than a noble one. 言有物而行有恆, words with something in them and conduct with a constant — the 疏's 口無擇言 and 身無擇行 say what the constant is for. In the world outside, speech is picked over constantly: the version for the client, the version for the manager, the version that will not be quoted back at you. A house is the one room with no audience left to select for, and the Image's answer is that this is not a burden but a test. If the words still have something in them when nobody is being impressed, they had something in them all along; if the conduct holds when no one is grading it, the constant is real. This is also the exact sense in which Jung's observation about the unlived life of the parent belongs on this page. What shapes a house is not what its adults say about themselves, and not the version of themselves they present outside it, but the life they are actually living in the hours nobody sees.

The third line is the one most readers will argue with, and it is worth being exact about. Wang Bi's sentence there has been read for a very long time as permission to be hard on a family, and the Small Says do not give that permission: what they call the severe house is 未失, having not lost anything, and what they call the ruined house is 失家節, having lost its measure. The distinction the line is actually drawing is between a house with a standard and a house with a mood. A house where nothing is ever at stake, where every friction is smoothed over and every disappointment laughed off, is the one the figure marks — and it marks it with 吝 rather than with 凶. The counsel is not severity. It is that a household needs something inside it that is capable of being disappointed.

The second and fifth lines are the figure's two central and correct places, and they are one mechanism seen from two ends. The second is 無攸遂, nothing pressed through on its own account, an office held without an agenda; the fifth is 交相愛, love running both ways, reached by a king who meets his house with compliance rather than command. Both of them are about what a position does rather than what it is owed, and between them they carry the figure's only 貞吉 and one of its two plain 吉. The political claim underneath them is the one the 彖 makes outright, 正家而天下定矣, and the 疏's version of it is flatter and stronger: 各正其家，無家不正，即天下之治定矣 — set each house right, and if no house is not, the ordering of the world is settled. Six lines, no 凶 anywhere among them, and the book's account of how anything large gets to be ordered comes down to what people do in a room nobody else is watching.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What does Hexagram 37 mean in one sentence?

That the household is the smallest complete unit of a human order and the one place where conduct is tested rather than performed, and that the whole of what it promises is 利女貞, correctness held inside a house. Wang Bi's note says outright that the judgment is deliberately narrower than the great ones, 非元亨利君子之貞，故「利女貞」, and the 疏 adds the reason, 既修家內之道，不能知家外他人之事. The figure hands out 吉 in five of its six lines and contains no 凶 and no 咎 at all, which is not a promise that families go well but a statement about where the outcomes are decided.

Why does the judgment name only the woman — is the hexagram saying this is a woman's business?

The three characters 利女貞 are a narrowing rather than a compliment, and Wang Bi explains the narrowing at once: 統而論之，非元亨利君子之貞 — taken as a whole, this is not the great passage and not a noble man's correctness, and so the judgment claims only what it can. The 疏 says the same in the plainer words of its world, 既修家內之道，不能知家外他人之事: a person tending the inside of a house does not know the affairs of the outside. The 彖 then names both halves, 女正位乎內，男正位乎外, and points at two places in the diagram, the second line and the fifth, which are the two central-and-correct places in the figure. The book comes from a world with one arrangement of a house in it. The part of the line that travels is the mechanism underneath it: 無攸遂, nothing pressed through on your own account, and 義無所必, nothing that must be.

What does 言有物而行有恆 mean — what is the 物 in a person's words?

物 here is not an object but a matter, and the 疏 says so in three characters, 物，事也. 言必有事，即口無擇言 — if what is said has a matter behind it, nothing has to be picked over; 行必有常，即身無擇行 — if the conduct has a constant, nothing in it has to be selected either. 擇, to pick over, is the character the whole Image turns against, and the 繫辭上 gives the sentence the Image is built on, 言出乎身加乎民；行發乎邇見乎遠。言行，君子之樞機；樞機之發，榮辱之主也. In a house the distance in that sentence is close to zero, which is why the figure asks for words with something in them rather than words that are well chosen.

Does the third line mean I should run my household strictly?

It means the figure has decided which failure it prefers, and the Small Says are more careful than the line is usually taken to be. 家人嗃嗃，未失也 — the severe house has not lost anything; 婦子嘻嘻，失家節也 — the slack house has lost its measure, 節. Wang Bi's preference is explicit and it is a preference rather than a rule: 行與其慢，寧過乎恭；家與其瀆，甯過乎嚴, better to overshoot toward respect than toward slackness, and better to overshoot toward strictness than to let a house go slack. The line carries both a 吉 and a 吝, and the 吝 it carries falls short of 凶. What it is actually distinguishing is a house with a standard from a house with a mood, and the failure it names is not too much laughing but 失家節, a lost measure.

The I Ching is a mirror for reflection, not a prediction machine.