Harmony and Contentment

Harmony and Contentment, also called Yü or Hexagram 16, describes a kingdom whose people rejoice in and readily obey their sovereign. The state is more than public pleasure: accord gives legitimate authority practical force, enabling appointments and military undertakings to receive the people’s support, while the line judgments distinguish steady discernment from self-indulgent satisfaction.

Political Meaning

The hexagram’s general judgment says that, in the condition it represents, feudal princes may be established and armies mobilized with advantage. The interpretation explains why: the time is one of harmony and happy contentment throughout the kingdom, and the people are willing to follow their ruler. Appointments and military action are therefore not presented as commands imposed upon a resistant population; they can be welcomed and supported because authority and popular feeling are aligned.

That political possibility depends on a relationship of trust within the figure. Its fourth line, undivided, is identified as the figure’s lord and, by its nearness to the fifth line—the place of dignity—as the ruler’s minister or chief officer. The ruler gives this officer confidence, and the other lines yield obedience. Harmony thus has a structure: confidence passes from ruler to minister, and obedience gathers around that trusted connection. Collective readiness is the consequence of ordered relations, not simply a mood of celebration.

The Lines: Excess and Discernment

The first line, divided, depicts a subject proclaiming his pleasure and satisfaction, but forecasts evil. The commentary does not condemn happiness itself: the subject may appropriately enjoy the favorable time. The fault is that he cannot contain his satisfaction and boasts of it. What should be a shared condition becomes self-display, and the favorable circumstance is spoiled by an undisciplined response.

The second line offers a contrasting use of the same time. Its subject is firm as a rock and sees what is coming without waiting for it to happen; with firm correctness, the result is good fortune. The commentary stresses that this line is weak yet correctly placed, and lies at the center of the lower trigram. Its subject can remain quietly in position and exercise far-seeing discrimination. Where the first line advertises its pleasure, the second turns steadiness into foresight.

The topmost divided line returns to the danger of absorption in pleasure. Its subject has a darkened mind, devoted to the satisfaction of the time, but can avoid error by changing course even when the situation may be considered complete. The qualification is consequential: fulfillment is not a reason to persist blindly. Read alongside the boastful first line and the perceptive second, the ending makes adaptability—not unbroken enjoyment—the means by which a fortunate condition is preserved.

Textual and Historical Context

The book’s account presents Yü’s political image as an interpretation associated with King Wen: a harmonious kingdom in which people rejoice in and readily obey their sovereign. More broadly, the author distinguishes the ancient Text from the Appendixes that explain and interpret it. He argues that the Text and Appendixes arose centuries apart and should not simply be treated as one homogeneous work; the Confucian Appendixes, even if attributed to Confucius, could not have begun before 483 BC, long after the portions associated with King Wen and the Duke of Zhou.

That distinction matters for reading a hexagram such as Yü, whose political explanation connects the figure’s lines to ruler, minister, confidence, and obedience. The author describes the blending of Text and Appendixes in common editions—five Appendixes were broken up and printed alongside the Text—as a source of interpretive confusion. The imperial Khang-hsî edition printed the two separately, although many scholars continued to defend their unity and the attribution of all the Appendixes to Confucius.

The book also traces the text’s survival and reception. In 213 BC, the Yî escaped the Qin book burning because the ban exempted works on medicine, divination, and agriculture, and the Yî was classified as a divination book. An imperial-library catalogue prepared by Liu Xin near the beginning of the Common Era recorded works on the Yî and its Appendixes from thirteen authors or schools, comprising 294 portions. The imperial edition published in 1715 quoted 218 scholars, while the author emphasizes both the value of native commentary and the continuing difficulty of interpreting the work. Against that long history, Yü’s compact movement from popular accord to political action, and from pleasure to the need for restraint, remains an example of how the text’s judgments acquire meaning through later explanation.