Hexagram 7師Army
When a substantial collective effort needs a commander, the I Ching is unsentimental about what it costs to do the work properly: the right leader, the right reason, and the discipline to refuse the campaign that does not have both. Without correctness and a seasoned commander, the operation that succeeds tactically destroys the legitimacy that made it worth undertaking.
60-second read
Army is the hexagram for the moment a serious collective effort needs to be mobilized under a single commander. The statement names the two non-negotiable conditions: 貞 — correctness, a legitimate cause — and 丈人 — the seasoned figure with the standing to lead. The instruction layer in the Xiang commentary is structural: water within the earth, reserves accumulated and disciplined before deployment. The line texts walk through the operational failure modes — idle leaders, younger men placed in command, small men retained after the campaign ends. The discipline is the right leader and the right reason.
The hexagram
師：貞，丈人吉，無咎。
Army: correctness. The seasoned commander brings fortune. No error. — Translation by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese
“Sze indicates how, in the case which it supposes, with firmness and correctness, and (a leader of) age and experience, there will be good fortune and no error.”
— 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.
師出以律，否臧凶。
The host goes forth according to the rules. If the rules are not good, there will be evil.
“The first SIX, divided, shows the host going forth according to the rules (for such a movement). If these be not good, there will be evil.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 1 is the yin at the bottom of the lower trigram of water — the opening moment of mobilization, where the campaign has not yet engaged anything and everything still depends on the quality of the rules the actor is moving under. The instruction is unsentimental: 師出以律 — the host goes forth by the rules — and 否臧凶 — if the rules are not good, the result is evil. The line is naming the fact that the rules are decided before the first action, not improvised inside it.
In a decision context this is the line for the day a serious initiative is launched — a hiring drive, a product roll-out, a fundraising campaign, a multi-team programme. The temptation at line 1 is to move because the team is ready and the moment feels right. The line is explicit that readiness without good rules is its own catastrophe. Founders and operators who learn to read line 1 cleanly spend the launch week writing the operating rhythm, the escalation paths, and the decision rights — not the launch announcement. The host does not go forth without the law. Set the rules. Then deploy.
在師中吉，無咎，王三錫命。
In the host, at the centre. Fortune. No error. The king thrice confers the command.
“The second NINE, undivided, shows (the leader) in the midst of the host. There will be good fortune and no error. The king has thrice conveyed to him the orders (of his favour).”
— Legge (1882)
Line 2 is the only yang in the hexagram and the structural centre of the lower trigram — the commander in the midst of the host. The instruction is precise. 在師中吉 — in the host, at the centre, fortune — names the operational posture: the commander is not behind the host directing it from a distance, and not ahead of it as a heroic vanguard, but inside it, sharing its position and its risk. 王三錫命 — the king thrice confers the command — names the legitimacy. The mandate is renewed three times, publicly, so the chain of authority is visible to everyone the commander is asking to follow.
The decision-relevant translation is the lesson of legitimacy and proximity together. Line 2 is the founder who is shipping in the same channel as the engineers, the executive who is on the call with the customer rather than reading the report, the campaign director who knows the precinct captains by name. Authority that is not visible at the centre of the work is not authority the host will follow into difficulty. The thrice-conferred command is the renewable institutional signal that the seat the commander occupies is the seat the institution has actually granted. For founders post-Series-A this is the line that says the board is publicly behind the CEO; for political organisers it is the moment the coalition formally endorses the strategy. The fortune named is unconditional. The conditions are stated as a pair — centred presence plus visible mandate — and both are required.
師或輿尸，凶。
The host, perhaps, with corpses in the carts. Evil.
“The third SIX, divided, shows how the host may, possibly, have many idle leaders. There will be evil.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 3 is the top of the lower trigram and the line where the campaign has begun but the chain of command is already fraying. The classical image is severe — 輿尸, corpses in the carts — and the traditional commentary reads it two ways: literally as the dead being carried back from the field, and figuratively as 多主, many masters, the operation moving with too many people claiming to be in charge. Both readings point at the same structural failure. Line 3 is the line of the campaign that has lost its single legitimate commander and acquired a board of self-appointed deputies who are each running pieces of the operation by their own judgement.
The decision-relevant translation is the diagnostic for the initiative that is technically still moving but has stopped being one effort. Founders hit line 3 when the launch is in market but the four leads are each making conflicting promises to the same customers; political organisers hit it when the volunteer captains start coordinating directly with the press without the campaign manager's sign-off; operators hit it when each functional head has accepted a slightly different version of the OKRs. The line does not say slow down or scale back. It says the multiple-commander configuration produces an evil outcome regardless of how well any individual deputy performs. The corrective is line 2's posture — one centred commander whose mandate has been visibly renewed — and the fortune of the whole hexagram depends on returning to it before line 6 arrives.
師左次，無咎。
The host retreats and encamps. No error.
“The fourth SIX, divided, shows the host in retreat. There is no error.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 4 is the bottom of the upper trigram of earth and the line of the disciplined retreat. 師左次 — the host shifts to the left and encamps — describes the classical military manoeuvre of withdrawing to a defensible position when the engagement is not winnable on the current ground. The line is brief by I Ching standards, and the brevity is the instruction. 無咎 — no error — is the unconditional verdict on a retreat that is taken in time and conducted in good order. The line does not characterise the retreat as a defeat. It characterises it as the correct continuation of the campaign at a moment when continuing the engagement would be the actual error.
The decision-relevant translation is the discipline of the planned step back. Operators reach line 4 when the launch is underperforming and the honest call is to pull back to a smaller deployable scope rather than escalate the marketing spend; founders reach it when the strategic bet has not produced the metrics it was supposed to produce by the milestone and the call is to retrench to the core product. Line 4 is the line that says the retreat is a legitimate move inside the campaign, not a failure of it. The condition is that the retreat is orderly — the host encamps, it does not scatter — and that it preserves the commander's authority for the next phase. Founders who can read line 4 cleanly avoid the line-6 ending in which the institution is later forced to retain the small men who were never properly demobilised.
田有禽，利執言，無咎。長子帥師，弟子輿尸，貞凶。
Birds in the field. It is advantageous to speak and seize them. No error. The eldest son leads the host; younger men ride with corpses. Even with correctness, evil.
“The fifth SIX, divided, shows birds in the fields. It will be advantageous to seize them. (In the operations of war) there will be no error. If the oldest son leads the host, and younger men idly occupy (offices assigned to them), however firm and correct (he may be), there will be evil.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 5 is the ruler line and the most operationally specific instruction in the hexagram. The first clause names a legitimate occasion for the use of force: 田有禽 — birds in the field, a concrete intrusion that has crossed into the actor's territory and can be named in plain terms. 利執言 — it is advantageous to speak the case and seize them. The cause is articulable, the response is proportionate, the action is sanctioned. The line then immediately raises the structural condition that determines whether the legitimate operation produces a good outcome: the seasoned 長子, the elder commander, must actually lead the host. If younger men — 弟子, juniors placed in nominal command — occupy the offices of command, the campaign fails even when the cause is correct.
The decision-relevant translation is severe and twofold. The first lesson is that a legitimate cause does not exempt the actor from the discipline of choosing the right commander. Founders who delegate a critical campaign to a junior because the cause is righteous discover at line 5 that righteousness without seasoning produces the line-3 corpses-in-the-carts pattern even though the trigger was correct. The second lesson is in the cadence of the line: 貞凶 — even with firm correctness, evil — names the rare case in the I Ching where correctness is explicitly insufficient. The hexagram refuses the consoling reading that a good cause is its own protection. The cause must be correct and the commander must be seasoned; either alone produces the catastrophic outcome at line 6.
大君有命，開國承家，小人勿用。
The great ruler issues commands: open the state, inherit the family. Small men should not be employed.
“The topmost SIX, divided, shows the great ruler delivering his charges, (appointing some) to be rulers of states, and others to undertake the headship of clans. But small men should not be employed.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 6 is the topmost line and the picture of what happens after the campaign succeeds. The great ruler issues the commands of settlement: some receive states to govern, some receive the heads of households to oversee, the spoils of the operation are distributed to the figures whose service made the victory possible. The line then names the single non-negotiable rule that determines whether the settlement holds: 小人勿用 — small men should not be employed. The institutional architecture that follows the campaign cannot be built around the operators who were useful in the field but lack the character to hold positions of standing authority.
The decision-relevant translation is the post-campaign discipline that most founders and operators miss. The temptation at line 6 is to reward the people who delivered the victory by giving them the senior post-campaign seats — the VP role, the board seat, the heading of the new division. The line is explicit that some of those operators are 小人 — small men, useful tactically but corrosive structurally — and that retaining them in standing authority is the move that compromises the legitimacy the campaign was fought for. The hexagram closes by recovering the original framing: 師 — Army — is a discipline for mobilizing collective force for a correct purpose, and the discipline includes the demobilisation phase. The campaign that wins on the field and keeps the small men in command afterward has not actually won; it has built the conditions under which the next Hexagram 6 — Conflict — becomes inevitable.
PostureRight leader · legitimate cause
Army puts Water (Kan) below and Earth (Kun) above — water held inside the earth, the army’s reserves accumulated and disciplined before deployment. The trigram configuration gives the hexagram its working image. The earth contains the water rather than the water cutting through the earth; the collective force is constituted before it is released; the campaign is supplied, ordered, and rehearsed inside the container of institutional discipline before any movement outward. The Tuan commentary compresses the logic: 師，眾也，貞，正也，能以眾正，可以王矣 — Army is the multitude; correctness is rectitude; to use the multitude with rectitude is the basis for kingly authority. The hexagram is not romanticising force. It is naming the precise conditions under which a substantial collective effort produces legitimate authority rather than consuming it.
The hexagram statement names the two non-negotiable conditions: 貞 — correctness, a legitimate cause — and 丈人 — the seasoned figure with the standing to lead. Neither alone is sufficient. A correct cause led by an unseasoned commander produces the corpses-in-the-carts pattern of line 3; a seasoned commander leading an unjustifiable campaign produces the granted-and-stripped pattern that line 6 of Hexagram 6 described. Army is the hexagram of the rare moment when both conditions can be met. The Xiang prescription — 君子以容民畜眾, the noble person contains the people and accumulates the multitude — treats the constituting work as the substantial discipline. The campaign begins long before the first deployment, in the accumulation of the reserves the campaign will draw on.
Failure modesIdle leaders (line 3) · younger men in command (line 5)
The two dominant failure modes are named directly in the line texts. Line 3’s 輿尸 — corpses in the carts — reads in the traditional commentary as a campaign with too many self-appointed commanders, the operation moving with each deputy running pieces by their own judgement. Line 5’s younger men placed in command is the inverse: a single nominal commander who lacks the seasoning the work requires, undertaken even though the cause is correct. The hexagram is explicit that 貞凶 — firm correctness, evil — is the verdict when the cause is right but the command is wrong. Both failures share a root: the actor treats either the cause or the commander as sufficient on its own, when the hexagram is naming the pair as the actual condition.
Application & adjacentQuestion shape · Hexagram 8 pair · Mobilizing a collective effort
A note on the question shape this hexagram answers best. Army rewards questions framed around a specific decision to mobilize a substantial collective effort under a single commander — a product launch that requires the whole organisation to move together, a political or organising campaign with a defined opponent, a fundraising round, a multi-team programme that needs unified direction. It is less useful for vague questions about teamwork or culture; for those questions, re-read with Hexagram 13 — Fellowship — or Hexagram 8 — Holding Together — depending on whether the question is about who is in the circle or about how the circle coheres. Army presumes the effort has both a clear cause and a clear opponent or objective.
The canonical adjacent reading is Hexagram 8 — Holding Together — the structural inverse in the King Wen sequence. Where Hexagram 7 puts water below the earth and names the disciplined deployment of organised force, Hexagram 8 inverts the trigrams — water above the earth — and names the cohesion that follows once the force has been demobilised and the alliance is being held together by voluntary union rather than chain of command. The two together form the complete collective-action arc. Hexagram 7 is the campaign; Hexagram 8 is the polity that the campaign was fought to constitute. Founders and political operators who keep both hexagrams in view tend to plan the demobilisation as carefully as the deployment, and to refuse the campaigns that produce victories which cannot be converted into Hexagram 8’s voluntary cohesion. Line 6 of Hexagram 7 is the explicit bridge: the great ruler distributes the post-campaign seats and refuses to employ the small men, because the Hexagram 8 polity that follows cannot be held together if the institutional architecture is staffed by figures whose authority was purely tactical.
SynthesisYiGram Editorial
Each Western line of reading approaches Army from a different angle. James Legge transliterates 師 as “Sze” and frames the hexagram within his Confucian moral lens — the canonical instruction that firmness and correctness together with a leader of age and experience produce good fortune and no error, with the closing line’s exclusion of small men from the post-campaign settlement read as a political-moral injunction. Richard Wilhelm’s symbolic-philosophical posture reads the hexagram as “The Army” in the broader sense — the disciplined mass moved by a single authority and the discipline of the leader who treats command as service rather than entitlement. A reading in the lineage of Carl Jung’s 1949 foreword would treat 7 as a marker of the psyche organising itself around a unifying principle, with the line-2 centred commander representing the integrating function whose authority is granted by the larger field. Bradford Hatcher’s linguistic project (below) abandons all three framings and returns to the semantic field of 師 itself — ready reserves, discipline, interdependence, the full vocabulary range of collective force under instruction. 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 7 師, his clusters are:
Ready reserves, liquidity, solvency, mobile and fungible assets, resourcefulness Interdependence, collective force, strength in numbers, coalition, solidarity, allies Instruction, discipline, training, regimen; planning for contingency, preparedness Hedging, strategic security, expedience; chain of command based on merit or skill Guardians, host; multiple uses of resources, the masses used as reservoir or pool A defensive army disguised as a people, an ad hoc army or a grass-roots militia
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 7 names a very specific working posture: a substantial collective effort that requires unified command, and the corresponding discipline of refusing to deploy without both a correct cause and a seasoned commander. The Wings give the canonical reading: water within the earth, reserves accumulated and disciplined; the noble person contains the people and accumulates the multitude; the firm at the centre is corresponded to from above, moving through peril yet compliant. Wang Bi sharpens the structural reading: line 2 is the only yang in the hexagram and the only legitimate command position, with the five surrounding yin lines as the host that follows. Zhu Xi reframes the hexagram around the pairing of 貞 and 丈人 — correctness and seasoning together — and stresses that the line-5 verdict of 貞凶 is the I Ching’s most explicit refusal of the consoling reading that a good cause protects the actor from operational failure. The divinatory manual Bushi Zhengzong reads 7 strictly as the marker for mobilization questions — launches, campaigns, contested initiatives requiring unified command — with practical attention to whether the actor in fact has both conditions in hand. The unified posture across all four sources is the same: Army is a discipline for constituting and deploying collective force only when the cause is correct and the command is seasoned, and for demobilising in good order when the campaign ends.
Yi ZhuanTuan + Xiang · Ten Wings
The Ten Wings are the canonical Confucian commentary stratum embedded in the received Yijing. For Hexagram 7 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: 師，眾也，貞，正也，能以眾正，可以王矣。剛中而應，行險而順，以此毒天下，而民從之，吉又何咎矣。
Army is the multitude. Correctness is rectitude. To use the multitude with rectitude — one can rule as king. The firm at the centre and corresponded to, moving through peril yet compliant — by this affliction set on the world, the people follow. Fortunate; what error could there be?
Xiang 象傳: 地中有水，師。君子以容民畜眾。
Water within the earth — Army. The noble person accordingly contains the people and accumulates the multitude.
The Tuan does the structural work: the multitude-and-rectitude pairing names the dual condition of the hexagram statement, and the firm-at-the-centre line is line 2 — the only yang in the configuration, the singular commander whose centred position is corresponded to by line 5 above. The Wing’s formula 行險而順 — moving through peril yet compliant — reads the Kan-below / Kun-above trigram pair as the operational posture of disciplined force: the peril is engaged but the chain of command remains ordered. The Xiang compresses the whole hexagram into a four-character ethical instruction: 容民畜眾 — contain the people and accumulate the multitude — treating the constituting work as the substantial discipline of the hexagram. Translations by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese.
Classical commentariesWang Bi · Zhu Xi · Bushi Zhengzong
Wang Bi (Zhouyi Zhu, 3rd century) reads Hexagram 7 around the structural fact that line 2 is the only yang in the configuration. For Wang Bi the analytical centre is singular command: the five yin lines are the host, and the single yang at the centre of the lower trigram is the commander whose centred position is the structural precondition for the campaign producing good fortune. The line-3 corpses-in-the-carts image is then read as the structural failure that occurs when the host attempts to operate with multiple commanders — the configuration that the hexagram’s single-yang structure explicitly rules out.
Zhu Xi (Zhouyi Benyi, 1188) reframes the hexagram around the pairing of 貞 and 丈人 in the opening statement. For Zhu Xi the two terms are not redundant: correctness names the legitimacy of the cause, the seasoned commander names the character of the leadership, and the hexagram is explicit that neither alone produces the fortune. The line-5 verdict of 貞凶 — firm correctness, evil — is the canonical I Ching refusal of the consoling reading that a good cause protects the actor from operational failure.
The Bushi Zhengzong (Qing-dynasty divinatory manual, 1709) reads 7 practically: a hexagram drawn in answer to a question about mobilising a substantial collective effort under unified command — a launch, a campaign, a contested initiative. The manual is explicit that 7 is not a commentary on whether the actor will prevail on the field; the cast applies whether the campaign succeeds or fails. The practical recommendation tracks the line position the question lands at: set the rules at line 1; centre the commander at line 2; consolidate command at line 3; retreat in good order at line 4; honour the seasoned commander at line 5; refuse to retain the small men 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: Kan (water), returning-soul generation (归魂). Binary, bottom-up: 010000. Lower trigram: Kan (water). Upper trigram: Kun (earth). Shi line: 3. Ying line: 6.
The line branches, bottom-up, follow the Kan-below / Kun-above najia composition for Army: 寅 (line 1), 辰 (line 2), 午 (line 3), 丑 (line 4), 亥 (line 5), 酉 (line 6). Read against the Kan palace, whose element is water, the six-relatives assignments are: line 1 寅 (wood) — offspring (子孫); line 2 辰 (earth) — officer (官鬼); line 3 午 (fire) — wealth (妻財); line 4 丑 (earth) — officer (官鬼); line 5 亥 (water) — siblings (兄弟); line 6 酉 (metal) — parents (父母).
The shi line at position 3 carries wealth (午, fire), the element that the Kan palace’s own water overcomes — the actor stands at the position of the resources the campaign is mobilizing, with the palace itself positioned to control them. The ying line at position 6 carries parents (酉, metal), the element that generates the palace’s own water. Read as a structural pair, the shi-ying axis of Army says that the actor occupies the wealth position — the substance of the campaign, the resources being deployed — while the receiving position is the generative authority above that legitimates the deployment. The structural correlate of the hexagram statement’s pairing 貞，丈人吉: the campaign is staged from the actor’s position of resources, but the fortune depends on the seasoned authority that sits above.
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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