Lü (旅): the traveler’s lodging, funds and servant

Fire on a mountain: Gen below, Li above

Lü (旅) is Li (fire) above and Gen (mountain) below. In the Shuo Gua, Gen is “stopping”, Li is “clinging”, and elsewhere Li is also called “brightness”. Counted from the bottom, the lines are two yin, two yang, one yin and one yang. Gen is a yang line on top of two yin lines; Li is yang, yin, yang, a yin line held between two yang ones.

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Lü and its inverse Jie: the inverse hexagram changes every line to the opposite polarity.

The judgment and the Commentary: small success, steadiness for the traveler

The judgment of Lü reads: small success; for the traveler, staying on course brings good fortune. The word “small” is measured, and the Commentary on the Judgments explains it by the shape of the figure.

Lü, small success: the yielding gets the middle on the outside and complies with the firm; it halts and clings to brightness. That is why there is small success, and why for the traveler staying on course brings good fortune. How great is the meaning of the time of Lü!

All three can be checked on the figure. Both central places of Lü (lines 2 and 5) hold yin lines; “the middle on the outside” is line 5, which belongs to the upper trigram, the “outside”. It has line 4 under it and the top line above it, two yang lines on either side, which is what “complies with the firm” points to. “Halts and clings to brightness” reads the two trigrams together: Gen below stops, Li above clings to light. A traveler who halts and yet turns toward the light gets only “small success”. The closing exclamation sets Lü within its time and praises the meaning of that time, without saying more.

The Great Image: fire on a mountain, clear, careful, nothing left waiting

The Great Image (大象) of Lü does not mention a traveler.

Fire on the mountain: Lü. The noble person is clear and careful in applying punishments, and does not let cases linger in prison.

Fire on a mountain burns across and does not stay in one place. From this the noble person takes three words: clear, careful, no lingering. Tradition usually reads them against the figure: Li is brightness, Gen is stopping, and stopping before one acts rashly is care; fire that does not stay is a case that is not left to sit in prison.

There is no “traveler” and no “journey” in the whole sentence. The Image borrows the track of the fire: it moves on and does not remain where it started.

Six lines: what the traveler holds and what he loses

In four of the six statements the traveler’s things are counted out one by one: where he stays, what he carries, who is with him.

The two lines that are not in the table tell something else. Line 1, at the bottom, says: the traveler is petty and fussy, and this is how he draws disaster on himself. The Small Image (小象) says his aim has run dry. Line 5 says: shoots a pheasant, one arrow lost, and in the end praise and a mandate. The Small Image says this “reaches up”, meaning it gets through to those above.

Back to the table. Line 2 is the one that has everything, and the Small Image says that in the end there is no fault. Line 3 reads: his lodging burns and he loses his servant. The Small Image first says that this is already harm, and then adds that a traveler who deals with those below him in this way loses what is right. Line 4 has a place and gets his funds and ax, yet says “my heart is not glad”, and the Small Image comments in two clauses: he has not yet got his position, and his heart is not yet glad. At the top, a bird’s nest burns and the traveler laughs first, then wails. Of “loses an ox at the border”, the last word is read in two common ways, as a field boundary or as carelessness. The Small Image ends: in the end no one hears of it.

Put side by side, the lines make a rising and falling curve: line 1 creates its own trouble, line 2 has everything, line 3 loses two things, line 4 has them but is not at ease, line 5 loses and gains, and in line 6 the nest burns and the ox is lost.

Feng, Da Guo and Jie: neighbors of Lü and its place after Feng

Turn Lü upside down and you get Feng (豐), so Feng is the reversed hexagram (综卦) of Lü. The nuclear hexagram (互卦) is Da Guo (大過): lines 2 to 4 of Lü form Xun, lines 3 to 5 form Dui, so Xun sits below and Dui above. The inverse hexagram (错卦) is Jie, shown in the figure above.

The Xu Gua says it in one line:

Those who push greatness to its limit lose their dwelling, so what follows is Lü.

Feng is “great”, and greatness carried to its end loses the dwelling, so Lü comes after Feng. After Lü comes Xun. The Xu Gua gives the reason in one clause: with no room for the traveler anywhere, “entering” is what follows. The inverse hexagram Jie points the other way: its first two lines both keep to a courtyard and do not go out. Lü is the hexagram of someone who is always outside.