Fellowship

The thirteenth hexagram, Tong Ren ("Fellowship with People"), places Qian (Heaven) above Li (Fire). Fire rising toward heaven, its flames all reaching upward, gives the image of people united in a common aim. It stands thirteenth in the King Wen order of the sixty-four.

Tong Ren holds a further position in the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary ordering devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi: seventeenth of 64, apart from its thirteenth place 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 Fellowship run yang, yin, yang, yang, yang, 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 Qian over Xun, forming hexagram 44, Coming to Meet (Gou), 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. Fellowship's King Wen partner is hexagram 14, Great Possession (Da You); 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, finds success in fellowship formed openly and in the field, that is, on broad and public grounds rather than in a narrow clique; it favors great undertakings, even crossing the great water, and rewards perseverance. The Image speaks of the superior person organizing the clans and distinguishing things by their kinds. The core theme is community and shared purpose grounded in openness. Moving lines change to their opposites and yield a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

The core judgment behind Tong Ren 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, Fellowship (Tong Ren), hexagram 13, is paired with its inversion: Great Possession (Da You), hexagram 14. 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 series reads the same lines closer to a historical record than a philosophical one.