The Family

The thirty-seventh hexagram, Jia Ren ("The Family" or Clan), places Xun (Wind) above Li (Fire). Wind rising from fire, as warmth generates the moving air, gives the image of influence spreading from within outward, as from the hearth of a well-ordered household. It follows Darkening of the Light in the King Wen sequence.

In the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary order devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi, Jia Ren stands 21st of 64, apart from its thirty-seventh 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 Family run yang, yin, yang, yin, 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 Li over Kan, forming hexagram 64, Before Completion (Wei Ji), 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 Family's King Wen partner is hexagram 38, Opposition (Kui); 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 the perseverance of the woman furthers, pointing to the well-run inner life of the home as the root of wider order. The Image speaks of the superior person whose words have substance and whose conduct has consistency, so that the family is regulated by example. The core theme is the family and the proper ordering of relationships, from which social order grows. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

The core judgment behind Jia 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, The Family (Jia Ren), hexagram 37, is paired with its inversion: Opposition (Kui), hexagram 38. 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.