EN (English)
䷉
Hexagram 10 of 64
Treading
履 · Lǚ
The hexagram of conduct, built on the book's most quoted image: stepping on the tiger's tail and not being bitten. What saves you is manner rather than strength.
conduct
care
risk
propriety
- King Wen number
- 10 of 64
- Above
- ☰ Qián · Heaven
- Below
- ☱ Duì · Lake
- Composition
- Heaven over Lake
- Lines, bottom to top
- Solid · solid · broken · solid · solid · solid
- Chinese
- 履 · Lǚ
The Judgment
Treading on the tiger's tail. It does not bite. Success.
A statement of fact rather than a promise. The tiger is real, the danger is real, and correct conduct is the entire margin of safety.
The Image
Heaven above, the lake below: Treading. So the noble person distinguishes high from low and steadies what the people aim at.
Clear differences of position are treated as a stabiliser, not an indignity. Everyone knowing where they stand is what makes movement safe.
What it means
Lü means to tread, and by extension to conduct oneself. The hexagram sets the weakest trigram beneath the strongest and asks how the lower survives contact with the upper.
The answer is conduct rather than power. The tiger in the image is not defeated, negotiated with or avoided; someone walks directly behind it and is not bitten, because of how they walk. This is the classic at its most practical about hierarchy. When you cannot alter the balance of strength, the variable you still control is your own bearing.
The two lines that step on the tail read very differently. The third line does it while overrating itself, a soldier acting like a ruler, and gets bitten. The fourth does it in a state of open apprehension and comes through. The classic's verdict is unmistakable: fear is information, and the person who has stopped feeling it in a dangerous position is the one in trouble.
The Image adds the structural half. Clear distinctions of rank are what let people move around each other safely, and blurring them, however well meant, is what puts someone in front of the tiger without knowing it.
In a reading
Treading as an answer means the situation is risky and navigable, and that the risk is largely about someone more powerful than you.
The counsel is care in manner: be plain, be correct, do not claim standing you do not have, and stay alert rather than confident. The hexagram is broadly positive. It just makes the outcome entirely dependent on how you carry yourself.
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
Look back over your conduct and weigh what it brought. When it comes round full circle, supreme good fortune.
Judging a course by its whole arc rather than by any single step.
-
Nine in the fifth place
Resolute conduct. Steadfastness in danger.
Decisive behaviour from a position of authority. It works, and the text refuses to call it safe.
-
Nine in the fourth place
Treading on the tiger's tail. Wary and afraid, and in the end good fortune.
The same act as the third line with fear intact. The classic rates nervousness highly as a survival skill.
-
Six in the third place
A one-eyed man sees, a lame man walks. He treads on the tiger's tail and it bites him. Misfortune. A soldier acting the part of a great ruler.
Capacity overestimated. The line is unusually direct: the trouble is not the tiger, it is a person playing a role they cannot hold.
-
Nine in the second place
Treading a level road. The steadiness of someone out of the world brings good fortune.
Quiet, unambitious, unobserved. The line prefers obscurity to opportunity here.
-
Nine at the beginning
Plain conduct. To go on brings no blame.
Behaving simply, without display. The safest possible footing and the easiest to keep.
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