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Hexagram 13 of 64
Fellowship
同人 · Tóng Rén
Fire rising toward heaven, two trigrams that move the same way. The hexagram is about association with others, and it insists that real fellowship be public and wide.
fellowship
common cause
openness
reconciliation
- King Wen number
- 13 of 64
- Above
- ☰ Qián · Heaven
- Below
- ☲ Lí · Fire
- Composition
- Heaven over Fire
- Lines, bottom to top
- Solid · broken · solid · solid · solid · solid
- Chinese
- 同人 · Tóng Rén
The Judgment
Fellowship in the open country. Success. It helps to cross the great water. It rewards the noble person's steadfastness.
The open country is the point. A union formed outdoors, in view, on general terms, is the only kind the hexagram endorses.
The Image
Heaven together with fire: Fellowship. So the noble person sorts the clans and tells things apart.
Union is not blurring. You associate well by knowing exactly who and what is who and what.
What it means
Tong Ren asks who counts as one of us, and gives an answer that was not obvious in an ancestor-centred society: the widest possible group, formed in the open, on shared purpose.
The Judgment puts the fellowship out in the countryside, away from the compound. The second line then delivers the hexagram's only rebuke, and it lands on association confined to your own clan. Kinship is not condemned; treating kinship as the boundary of solidarity is.
The middle lines are about the failure mode of alliance, which is suspicion. Armed men are hidden in the undergrowth, a lookout is posted on a hill, and three years pass with nothing happening. The fourth line has the wall already scaled and the attack called off, and the classic marks that abandonment as good fortune.
Then the fifth line, one of the most emotionally direct in the book: weeping first, laughter afterwards, two armies that finally meet. Reconciliation across real distance, and the text does not pretend it came cheap.
The Image supplies the discipline that makes any of this work. Fellowship depends on distinguishing things clearly, not on pretending differences are absent.
In a reading
Fellowship as an answer favours joining with others on shared terms, and it favours doing so openly and broadly.
Its warning is factional: a group closed around family, history or convenience will produce regret even when everyone in it is agreeable. If the matter involves an estrangement, the fifth line is unusually encouraging about the possibility of meeting again after difficulty.
The six lines
Read a line's text only when the cast made it a moving line. They are listed from the top of the figure down, the way the hexagram is drawn.
-
Nine at the top
Fellowship in the meadow. No regret.
Outside the town, in a smaller company. Not the ideal union, and nothing to reproach either.
-
Nine in the fifth place
Fellowship: first weeping and wailing, then laughter. Great armies manage to meet.
Union achieved through what it cost. The two forces reach each other after a long separation.
-
Nine in the fourth place
Mounting the wall and unable to attack. Good fortune.
The assault is prepared, the position is taken, and the aggression is dropped. Good fortune for the decision not to.
-
Nine in the third place
Hiding armed men in the thicket and climbing the high hill. For three years nothing rises.
Suspicion dressed up as strategy. Three years of watching for an attack that never comes.
-
Six in the second place
Fellowship inside the clan. Regret.
Association limited to your own people. The only line in the hexagram with a negative verdict, and this is why.
-
Nine at the beginning
Fellowship at the gate. No blame.
Just outside the house: the first step past your own circle, and the text approves immediately.
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