Hexagram 13同人Fellowship
Fellowship in the open country: the coalition is built in public, around a purpose any of the parties could claim as their own. The discipline is candour about the common cause and the restraint to refuse the factional shortcut that would trade universal claim for a closer circle.
60-second read
Fellowship is the hexagram for the moment when an effort requires gathering people who share your purpose but not your identity. The statement is direct: 同人于野 — fellowship in the open country, in public, not within the clan. Success follows; the great stream may be crossed; firm-correctness of the noble person is advantageous. The instruction layer in the Xiang commentary is structural: heaven and fire — the noble person classifies clans and distinguishes things, then gathers across the categories. Faction at the kindred (line 2) brings regret. The discipline is universal claim plus the candour to declare it openly.
The hexagram
同人：同人于野，亨，利涉大川，利君子貞。
Fellowship with others in the open country. Success. Advantage in crossing the great stream. Advantage in the firm-correctness of the noble person. — Translation by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese
“Thung Zän (or Union of men) appears here (as we find it) in the remote districts of the country, indicating progress and success. It will be advantageous to cross the great stream; advantageous to maintain the firm correctness of the superior man.”
— James Legge, The Sacred Books of the East: The I Ching (1882), public domain.
The six lines
Click any line on the hexagram to read its passage. Use ↑ and ↓ after focusing the hexagram to step through the six positions.
同人于門，無咎。
Fellowship at the gate. No error.
“The first NINE, undivided, (shows the representative of) the union of men just issuing from his gate. There will be no error.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 1 is the yang at the bottom — the moment the actor steps out from the household and into the threshold of public association. 同人于門 — fellowship at the gate — names the opening posture precisely. The actor has not yet entered the open country the hexagram statement points at, but they have already moved past the private circle. The line is unsentimental about this scope: 無咎 — no error. There is no fortune named at line 1; there is only the absence of fault. The implicit instruction is that the gate is the right altitude for the first move. Going further than the gate before the coalition has formed produces line 3's hidden ambush; going less far stays inside the kindred of line 2 and forfeits the open-country claim.
In a decision context this is the line of the first founding conversation, the first public hire, the first signed open letter, the first identified co-investor. The temptation at line 1 is to either over-commit — to declare the coalition in finished form before the second person has actually joined — or to under-commit, holding the conversation inside the close circle while telling oneself the wider declaration is still premature. The line is explicit that the gate is the correct frame. The actor has stepped out far enough to be visible. They have not stepped out so far that the visibility commits them past the relationships they actually have. No error. Proceed.
同人于宗，吝。
Fellowship with the kindred. Cause for regret.
“The second SIX, divided, (shows the representative of) the union of men in relation with his kindred. There will be occasion for regret.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 2 is the only yin in the hexagram and the centred position of the lower trigram — structurally, the line that ought to carry the hexagram's correspondence with line 5 above. The text disqualifies it: 同人于宗 — fellowship within the kindred — 吝 — cause for regret. The line names the most common failure of the hexagram. The actor gathers a coalition; the coalition coheres because the parties already share a tribe, an alma mater, a former employer, a friendship circle, a sect; and the gathering is then misread as the open-country fellowship the hexagram statement actually requires. The regret is not catastrophe. It is the kind of cost that does not declare itself until the moment the coalition has to recruit beyond the kindred and finds it cannot.
The decision-relevant translation is the warning against the comfortable shortcut. Founders who hit line 2 typically discover that the team they assembled out of personal trust resembles itself too closely to do the universal work the hexagram statement was pointing at. Political organisers hit line 2 when the coalition is technically large but socially homogeneous. The instruction is to refuse the shortcut even when the shortcut is the available option. The kindred reading produces a fellowship that holds in calm conditions and dissolves the first time the open-country claim is tested. Better to build the coalition slower, across categories, than to ratify a faction and call it fellowship. The line is the hexagram's specific corrective and the place where the noble person's 貞 — firm-correctness — is most concretely tested.
伏戎于莽，升其高陵，三歲不興。
Arms hidden in the thick grass. Climbing to the top of the high mound. For three years he does not rise.
“The third NINE, undivided, (shows its subject) with his arms hidden in the thick grass, and at the top of a high mound. (But) for three years he makes no demonstration.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 3 is the top of the lower trigram and the line where the temptation of covert action enters the hexagram. The actor has weapons hidden in the thick grass, has climbed the high mound to survey the field, and for three years does not rise to the attack. The image is precise and unflattering. The actor sees the coalition forming around line 5 above, suspects they will be excluded or outranked, and prepares for the contingency by stockpiling leverage they can deploy if the fellowship turns against them. The leverage is real; the position on the mound is real; the line is honest that the three-year wait is the structural outcome. The ambush never launches because the moment to launch it never comes.
For decision-makers this is the line of the executive who quietly briefs an outside party against the coalition forming inside the company, the operator who maintains a separate channel of authority in case the partnership goes sideways, the politician who hedges their public endorsement with backstage commitments to the opposition. The hexagram does not condemn the prudence — line 3 produces no overt error — but it names the cost precisely. Three years of held leverage is three years of energy diverted from the open-country work the hexagram statement was asking for. The corrective is not to abandon the leverage; it is to recognise that the leverage has already been priced in and that maintaining the hidden posture past the moment it served keeps the actor on the mound while the fellowship moves past them. Disarm. Come down.
乘其墉，弗克攻，吉。
Mounted on the city wall. Cannot complete the attack. Fortune.
“The fourth NINE, undivided, (shows its subject) mounted on the city wall; but he does not proceed to make the attack (he contemplated). There will be good fortune.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 4 sits at the start of the upper trigram and pictures the actor mounted on the city wall, in position to launch the attack the line 3 actor was still hiding for, but explicitly: 弗克攻 — cannot complete the attack — 吉 — fortune. The Tuan commentary attached to this line is unusually specific: the actor returns to the rule because they recognise that the attack their position physically permits is the attack their integrity does not. The fortune named is not the fortune of a victory withheld for tactical reasons. It is the fortune of an actor who climbed to a position of force and discovered that force was the wrong instrument for the open-country claim the hexagram was asking them to make.
The decision-relevant translation is the line of the operator who has every legal right to escalate — to publish the damning memo, to invoke the contract penalty, to file the complaint — and who, from the position of force, chooses not to. Founders who hit line 4 typically describe the moment as a kind of relief. The wall has been mounted; the attack was within reach; the choice not to launch it is what keeps the coalition the actor spent line 1 through line 3 assembling. For decision-makers in active negotiations this is the line that says the maximum-leverage move has been prepared and is then explicitly withheld. The fortune is unconditional. The wall is where the discipline gets tested, not where the dispute gets settled.
同人，先號咷而後笑，大師克相遇。
Fellowship: first wailing and crying, then laughing. The great host conquers and they meet together.
“The fifth NINE, undivided, (shows the representative of) the union of men first wailing and crying out, and then laughing. His great host conquers, and he (and the subject of the second line) meet together.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 5 is the ruler line and the emotional centre of the hexagram. The image is the most psychologically detailed in the reading: the actor first wails and cries out — 先號咷 — and then laughs — 後笑. Between the wailing and the laughter, the great host conquers, and the line 5 actor and the line 2 actor — separated through the middle of the hexagram by the hidden weapons of line 3 and the city wall of line 4 — meet together. The line is naming the cost of the open-country claim explicitly. Building a coalition across categories rather than within the kindred is genuinely hard. The actor will grieve the easier path before they laugh at the harder one having succeeded.
For decision-makers this is the most honest line in the hexagram about what fellowship actually costs. The wailing is not weakness; it is the appropriate response to the loss of the closer circle that the kindred path would have made available. The laughter is not premature; it is the structural outcome of having held the open-country discipline through the period when it produced only friction. Founders who reach line 5 typically describe the arc as longer than the original coalition plan suggested, and as producing a fellowship strong enough to hold conditions the kindred coalition would not have survived. The great host conquers because the universal claim was honest, not because the campaign was clever. The meeting is the structural reward for the discipline of refusing the line 2 shortcut.
同人于郊，無悔。
Fellowship in the suburbs. No occasion for repentance.
“The sixth NINE, undivided, (shows the representative of) the union of men in the suburbs. There will be no occasion for repentance.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 6 is the topmost line and the resting position of the hexagram. The image is the suburbs — 郊 — not the open country of the hexagram statement and not the gate of line 1, but the outer edge of the inhabited region. 無悔 — no occasion for repentance. The line names a fellowship that has held its discipline far enough to settle at the periphery without grievance. There is no extraordinary fortune at line 6; there is also no cost. The actor and the fellowship have completed the arc the hexagram traces.
The decision-relevant translation is the under-celebrated line of the coalition that holds without continuing to perform its own gathering. Founders and organisers who reach line 6 cleanly typically describe a project that has settled into its proper shape — not the high-energy convergence of line 5, but the durable peripheral fellowship that the open-country claim was always pointed at. The line is honest about the modesty of the outcome. There is no triumphant centre; there is no wailing transition; there is the suburb. For decision-makers post-coalition this is the line that names the moment the alliance stops being a campaign and becomes a way of working. No regret. The fellowship is its own settled position.
PostureFellowship in the open country · gathered around common purpose
Fellowship pairs Heaven (Qian) above with Fire (Li) below. Fire rises toward heaven — the visible energy of like-minded gathering, the public ascent of a shared purpose that any of the parties could claim as their own. The hexagram statement names the scope precisely: 同人于野 — fellowship in the open country — not within the clan, not inside the household, not behind the closed doors of the kindred. The open country is the I Ching’s figure for the public arena in which a claim has to stand on its universal merit rather than on the pre-existing tribal loyalty of the parties gathered around it.
The instruction layer in the Xiang commentary is structural rather than tactical: 天與火，同人。君子以類族辨物 — heaven and fire, Fellowship; the noble person accordingly classifies clans and distinguishes things. The work of fellowship is not the dissolution of category but the careful identification of which categories the open-country claim is bridging. The discipline is twofold. First, declare the common purpose in public, where any of the gathered parties can affirm or refuse it on its stated terms. Second, hold the purpose stable through the period in which the kindred shortcut at line 2 will offer itself as an easier route. The whole hexagram is the corrective for coalitions that begin with universal claim and quietly collapse into faction once the work becomes hard.
Failure modesFaction at the kindred (line 2) · ambush at the high mound (line 3)
The two named failure modes pair structurally. Line 2 is the regret of fellowship that has narrowed to the kindred — the coalition that coheres because the parties already share a school, a former employer, a tribe, a sect, and is then misread as the open-country fellowship the hexagram statement required. The regret is not catastrophe; it is the cost that surfaces the moment the coalition has to recruit past the kindred and discovers it cannot. Line 3 is the inverse trap: the actor reads the gathering coalition as a threat, stockpiles leverage in the high grass, climbs to the survey position on the high mound, and waits three years for the ambush that never launches. Both failures share a root. Neither party trusts the open-country claim enough to act on it. Line 2 substitutes the closer tribe; line 3 substitutes the hidden weapon. The noble person’s 貞 — firm-correctness — is what holds the actor on the open-country path through the period both shortcuts are tempting.
Application & adjacentQuestion shape · Hexagram 14 pair · Coalition over clan
A note on the question shape this hexagram answers best. Fellowship rewards questions framed around a specific coalition-building effort — a founding team being assembled across former affiliations, a political organising drive that must reach beyond a base, a multi-company partnership convening parties with overlapping but not identical interests, an open-source project recruiting maintainers from outside the original contributor circle. It is less useful for questions about individual loyalty or close personal relationships; for those, re-read with Hexagram 8 — Holding Together — or Hexagram 31 — Mutual Influence — depending on whether the question is about chosen alliance or about authentic attraction. Fellowship presumes the actor is trying to gather across categories rather than within one.
The canonical adjacent reading is Hexagram 14 大有 — Great Possession — the King Wen pair. Where Hexagram 13 names the discipline of gathering the coalition in the open country, Hexagram 14 names what the gathered effort yields: abundance the noble person must steward without flaunting. The two together form a complete arc. In 13 the work is universal claim plus the restraint to refuse the kindred shortcut; in 14 the work is stewardship of what the universal claim produced, without letting abundance reset the actor’s posture from coalition-builder back into clan-leader. Founders and organisers who keep both hexagrams in view tend to build coalitions that survive their own success — the most common failure mode for coalitions that succeeded too well being the slide from 13 to a regression of 13’s kindred shortcut once 14’s abundance arrives. The pair is the hexagram’s answer to that regression: stay in the open country after the great host has conquered.
SynthesisYiGram Editorial
Each Western line of reading approaches Fellowship from a different angle. James Legge transliterates 同人 as “Thung Zän” and frames the hexagram within his Confucian moral lens — the union of men in the remote districts, the discipline of the superior man’s firm correctness, the political reading of fellowship as the legitimate basis of public association. Richard Wilhelm’s symbolic-philosophical posture reads the hexagram as “Fellowship with Men” in the more general sense — the great image of heaven and fire moving in the same direction and the discipline of universal openness over tribal closure. A reading in the lineage of Carl Jung’s 1949 foreword would treat 13 as a marker of the integrating community function within the psyche, with the wailing-then-laughing arc at line 5 representing the emotional cost of holding the universal claim past the point where the closer shortcut tempts the actor. Bradford Hatcher’s linguistic project (below) abandons all three framings and returns to the semantic field of 同人 itself — society, social organization, association, coalition, the full vocabulary range of human gathering and its failure modes. None of these readings is quoted on this page; the synthesis is YiGram Editorial’s characterization of each tradition’s posture, written so a reader can triangulate the field without us reproducing copyrighted text.
Reception historyLegge · Wilhelm · Baynes · Jung
The Western reception of the I Ching has two main lines. The first is James Legge’s 1882 missionary translation in the Sacred Books of the East series — methodical, Victorian, framed around Confucian moral readings. It is the public-domain anchor reproduced above. The second is Richard Wilhelm’s 1923 German translation, prepared in Qingdao in collaboration with Lao Naixuan — sympathetic, philosophical, closer to Daoist intuitions. Cary F. Baynes rendered Wilhelm into English in 1950, with a foreword by Carl Jung that introduced the book to Western psychology as a window onto synchronicity and the unconscious.
We cite these two lines by name to credit the reception history and to help search systems and readers resolve the entities; the Wilhelm/Baynes text itself and Jung’s foreword remain in copyright and are not quoted on this page. A more recent academic-linguistic line is represented by Bradford Hatcher’s Yijing project (1990s–2010s), which appears in the next section under his explicit redistribution permission.
Bradford HatcherVerbatim · © 2011
Hatcher organizes each hexagram around six short clusters of keywords that sketch the field of decision and association the Chinese name opens onto. For Hexagram 13 同人, his clusters are:
Society, social organization, human association, classes of people, community Extended family, fraternity, agreement, coalition; crossing cultural boundaries Ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism & xenophobia; common purposes & causes Mutual endorsement and admiration societies, like-minded people, consensus Schools of thought, group-think, cultural diversity, relativity of mores & values Belief systems, collective associations, mass follies; symposiums, convergences
Hatcher’s framing is vocabulary-centred rather than narrative — the reader is invited to feel the semantic shape of the Chinese name through the spread of English fragments. For his longer notes and the full glossary entry, read the complete passage on hermetica.info.
Quoted verbatim from Bradford Hatcher, Yijing Hexagram Names and Core Meanings (Version 12.1, 2011), hermetica.info/GuaMing.htm. © Bradford Hatcher, 2011. Reproduced under the author’s explicit permission to redistribute his work intact, with copyright notice. Bradford Hatcher (d. June 2020); site maintained to preserve his work.
SynthesisYiGram Editorial
Read across the four Chinese traditions, Hexagram 13 names a very specific working posture: a coalition that has to be built in public, across categories, around a purpose any of the gathered parties could claim as their own, and the corresponding discipline of refusing the factional shortcut that would trade universal claim for closer tribal loyalty. The Wings give the canonical reading: the yielding line at position 2 attains the centre and corresponds with Qian above; cultured-bright with robustness, centred-correct in correspondence — only the noble person can connect the aims of the whole world. The Xiang compresses the operational instruction into four characters: 類族辨物 — classify clans and distinguish things — the work of careful category identification that makes the open-country claim possible. Wang Bi reads the hexagram as a structural argument about correspondence: line 2 and line 5 are the centred axis the fellowship runs along, and the intervening lines 3 and 4 are the named obstacles the axis has to survive. Zhu Xi reframes the hexagram around line 5’s wailing-then-laughing arc — the emotional cost of the discipline made explicit. The divinatory manual Bushi Zhengzong reads 13 strictly as the marker for coalition-building under public scrutiny, with the practical recommendation that the actor refuse the kindred reading even when the kindred reading is technically available. The unified posture across all four sources is the same: Fellowship is the discipline of universal claim held in public, through the period in which the closer shortcut would offer itself as the easier route.
Yi ZhuanTuan + Xiang · Ten Wings
The Ten Wings are the canonical Confucian commentary stratum embedded in the received Yijing. For Hexagram 13 the two most directly relevant Wings are the Tuan Zhuan (彖傳, the Judgement Commentary) and the Xiang Zhuan (象傳, the Image Commentary).
Tuan 彖傳: 同人，柔得位得中而應乎乾，曰同人。同人曰：同人于野，亨，利涉大川，乾行也。文明以健，中正而應，君子正也。唯君子為能通天下之志。
Fellowship: the yielding attains its place, gains the centre, and corresponds with Qian — called Fellowship. The Fellowship verse says: “Fellowship in the open country, success, advantage in crossing the great stream” — Heaven’s action. Cultured-bright with robustness, centred-correct in correspondence — the noble person’s correctness. Only the noble person can connect the aims of the whole world.
Xiang 象傳: 天與火，同人。君子以類族辨物。
Heaven and fire — Fellowship. The noble person accordingly classifies clans and distinguishes things.
The Tuan does the structural work: the yielding line at position 2 is what makes the hexagram possible — centred, in correspondence with the firm line above — and the Wing then names the operational discipline as the noble person’s capacity to connect the aims of the whole world. The Xiang compresses the whole hexagram into a four-character ethical instruction: 類族辨物 — in classifying clans and distinguishing things — treating category work as the structural prevention of the line 2 kindred shortcut. Translations by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese.
Classical commentariesWang Bi · Zhu Xi · Bushi Zhengzong
Wang Bi (Zhouyi Zhu, 3rd century) reads Hexagram 13 as a structural argument about correspondence. For Wang Bi the analytical centre is the line 2 / line 5 axis — the yielding at the centre below corresponding with the firm at the centre above — and the intervening lines 3 and 4 are the named obstacles the axis has to survive. The hidden weapons of line 3 and the city wall of line 4 are not random images; they are the two specific failure modes that interrupt the correspondence the hexagram requires. The line-2 regret follows the same logic in reverse: the yielding has the position to correspond with line 5 but forfeits the correspondence by closing it inside the kindred.
Zhu Xi (Zhouyi Benyi, 1188) reframes the hexagram around the wailing-then-laughing arc at line 5. For Zhu Xi the emotional language is the hexagram’s clearest statement of what universal claim actually costs. The wailing is not weakness or rhetorical flourish; it is the accurate response to having declined the kindred shortcut at line 2 and accepted the longer, harder work of open-country coalition. The laughter that follows is the structural reward for having held the discipline. The great host conquers because the universal claim was honest, not because the campaign was clever.
The Bushi Zhengzong (Qing-dynasty divinatory manual, 1709) reads 13 practically: a hexagram drawn in answer to a question about coalition-building, partnership formation, public alliance, or any effort that requires gathering parties across categories rather than within one. The manual is explicit that 13 favours the actor whose stated purpose can survive open scrutiny and warns against the coalition whose stated purpose disguises a narrower interest. The practical recommendation tracks the line position the question lands at: step out to the gate at line 1; refuse the kindred at line 2; disarm at line 3; withhold the prepared attack at line 4; expect the wailing before the laughter at line 5; settle in the suburbs at line 6.
Translations and paraphrase by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese. We do not reuse any modern third-party English rendering of these commentaries.
These method notes are not required to read the hexagram. They organize the traditional six-line structure for readers who want to see the rule layer beneath the plain-language reading.
Palace: Li (fire), returning-soul generation (归魂). Binary, bottom-up: 101111. Lower trigram: Li (fire). Upper trigram: Qian (heaven). Shi line: 3. Ying line: 6.
The line branches, bottom-up, follow the Li-below / Qian-above najia composition for Fellowship: 卯 (line 1), 丑 (line 2), 亥 (line 3), 午 (line 4), 申 (line 5), 戌 (line 6). Read against the Li palace, whose element is fire, the six-relatives assignments are: line 1 卯 (wood) — parents (父母); line 2 丑 (earth) — offspring (子孫); line 3 亥 (water) — officials (官鬼); line 4 午 (fire) — siblings (兄弟); line 5 申 (metal) — wealth (妻財); line 6 戌 (earth) — offspring (子孫).
The shi line at position 3 carries officials (亥, water), the element that controls the Li palace’s native fire — the actor stands in a position structurally checked by the palace, which is what gives the line-3 hidden-weapons image its specific weight: the actor’s seat is the one the palace is most exposed to. The ying line at position 6 carries offspring (戌, earth), the element the palace’s fire produces. Read as a structural pair, the shi-ying axis of Fellowship says that the actor occupies the controlling position while the receiving position is what the actor’s effort generates. The structural correlate of the Xiang’s 類族辨物: the work of category-distinguishing sits at the shi seat, and the produced fellowship settles at the ying position at the suburban edge of line 6.
For a cast, this static layer records the palace, generation label, shi and ying positions, each line's branch and six-relative, moving-line positions, transformed hexagram, and the use-spirit selected by question category. The public page keeps that structure as a method note rather than as default reading text.
Audit status: unaudited_draft. The static-layer tables are pulled from the standard 京房纳甲 sequence and have not yet been cross-checked against the three reference texts named in the methodology. Errors should be reported against the v0.1.0 rule version in the GitHub rules directory.
For the full pipeline (how the static layer reaches the AI interpretation), see Methodology → Najia engine.
Sources
- Classical text of the Yijing (周易) — hexagram and line statements (卦辭 / 爻辭) from the received Zhou-dynasty edition. Public domain.
- James Legge, The Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XVI: The Yi King, Oxford University Press, 1882. Public domain.
- Zhu Xi (朱熹), Zhouyi Benyi (周易本義), 1188. Public domain.
- Wang Bi (王弼), Zhouyi Zhu (周易注), 3rd century. Public domain.
- Bushi Zhengzong (卜筮正宗), Qing-dynasty divinatory manual, 1709. Public domain.
- Tuan Zhuan (彖傳) and Xiang Zhuan (象傳), two of the Ten Wings (十翼). Public domain.
- Bradford Hatcher, Yijing Hexagram Names and Core Meanings (Version 12.1, 2011). © Bradford Hatcher, 2011. Reproduced under the author’s explicit permission to redistribute his work intact, with copyright notice; this page quotes the “Key Words” subsection only and links readers to the full original for the longer notes. Bradford Hatcher (d. June 2020).
All Chinese-to-English translations on this page are by YiGram Editorial, working directly from the classical Chinese. We do not reuse third-party modern English translations of any of the listed Chinese sources. Read the full source policy in the methodology page.
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