Where they are in the Yijing
There are three mentions in the Zhouyi – the oldest layer of the Yijing text – of ‘establishing feudal lords’: in the Oracle of Hexagram 3, and its first line, and in the Oracle of Hexagram 16. (Then they’re also mentioned in the Image of Hexagram 8, and there’s Lord Kang in Hexagram 35.)
If you mostly use the Wilhelm/Baynes translation, you may well have no idea what I’m on about. (Of course this may often happen to many people and for unrelated but excellent reasons…) It doesn’t mention ‘establishing feudal lords’, only ‘installing helpers’. ‘In order to overcome the chaos’ of Hexagram 3, according to Wilhelm’s commentary, ‘he needs helpers.’ And at Hexagram 16, ‘It is Enthusiasm that enables us to install helpers for the completion of an undertaking without fear of secret opposition.’ Helpers create order, foster harmony and get things done.
And this is – of course – good, directly usable advice: get some help in place if you want to accomplish anything. However, if we dig a bit further into the original meaning, there might be more to learn.
What is a feudal lord, anyway?
Feudal lords are those appointed by the king to rule the regions in his stead. The Chinese words in hexagrams 3 and 16 are 建侯, jian hou, and they can be literally translated as ‘enfeoff a lord’. The etymology of both characters is interesting:
侯 hou, lord, shows a person and an arrow hitting a target – or in very early forms, just the arrow in the target. A lord may originally have been a distinguished archer. The Shuowen says of this,
‘Targets for archery at the great Spring Ceremony. The character shows a man and the target where he has shot his arrow. The sovereign shot at bear, tiger and leopard targets [ie targets made from these animal skins], showing thus that he repressed rebellion. The feudal lords shot at bear, boar and tiger, the senior officials at large deer, the officials at smaller deer and at panther, to expel evil influences from the fields.’
So… perhaps the foundational idea is that a lord is someone who keeps things safe and peaceful, deterring attacks and driving out enemies material or spiritual, through his skill with the bow.
And 建 jian, meaning to enfeoff, establish, found, originally seems to have depicted a man driving a post into the ground. (As always with ancient Chinese characters, this isn’t an exact science – no doubt different scribes wrote the word differently – but the bronze inscription characters here and here look very much like someone driving in a post.)
Installing feudal lords starts to look a little like building a line of defence – and that’s certainly part of the historical picture. According to the Book of Rites, immediately after King Wu had overthrown the Shang regime, before he had even descended from his chariot, he had already begun to enfeoff lords. They would have held land on his behalf, outposts distributed along the Yellow River Valley.
A noble, often a relation of the king’s, might be comfortably ensconced in the security of the capital, only to be told by his king to take troops and set out to establish a garrison – Britannica describes these as ‘colonies’. Such lords would support one another, and could also call on military support from the centre.
In this way the ruler at the centre expands his sphere of influence and – I imagine – creates a ‘buffer zone’ between the capital and hostile forces. It reminds me of the defensive role of the archer, and the lords driving evil influences from the fields.
Within his own realm, a feudal lord was like a mini-king: making local law, conducting religious rites, and entitled to his share of local produce. He would also owe a duty to the king, to provide tribute and soldiers. The flow of resources goes both ways, both from and to the capital, and also between the feudal states in mutual support.
In the bronze vessels cast to commemorate enfeoffments, becoming a feudal lord is described as a great honour, one the lord accepts with humility and gratitude. Inscriptions express faith that the newly-cast vessel would be handed down to their descendants, and so too would the fief. There’s no sense here of defence or precarity, only becoming part of an ever-expanding, harmonious realm, held together by bonds of mutual loyalty.
A second look at the text
What light could all this cast on the hexagrams?
The name of Hexagram 3, zhun, might be translated as ‘sprouting’ and ‘Difficulty at the Beginning’ – but also (pronounced tun) means to station troops, or a garrison. In other words, exactly what a feudal lord would establish when first sent out to bring a new region into the king’s realm.
And there’s the most basic idea of Hexagram 3: that this is the beginning. Wu starts naming feudal lords before he even gets down from his chariot. To weave together a thriving, interconnected kingdom, you need your garrisons first. To grow an oak tree, the acorn starts with roots.
In the Oracle of Hexagram 3, setting up feudal lords is one half of a contrast:
‘Sprouting.
From the source, creating success, constancy bears fruit.
Don’t use this to have a direction to go,
Fruitful to establish feudal lords.’
‘Do this, not that’: don’t go places, don’t set out to explore in a single direction; instead, consolidate power at the centre first by spreading your network in all directions. This is how to grow.
There might (speculation alert!) be a more specific contrast implied here. Harmen Mesker has suggested that the ‘direction to go’, 攸往 you wang, is a ‘far place’, and this is about making a royal journey out to the border realms. Shang kings (according to Britannica) had been largely peripatetic, constantly touring in an effort to maintain their influence and alliances with regional lords. But if the regional lords are your own appointees (and probably family members), the strength of the network would strengthen the centre and mean less need to tour.
So… ‘having a direction to go’ vs ‘establishing feudal lords’ is the difference between narrowing and expanding possibilities, but perhaps also between trying to do it all yourself, be everywhere at once, and delegation. (Or ‘installing helpers’, as a wise translator once wrote…)
There’s a spectrum of associations for feudal lords: from the harmonious flow of support and loyalty through an ordered network, through to a venture into new territory to establish the first garrison. Plainly, Hexagram 3 is at the beginning.
But… look what stands across from it: its complementary hexagram, 50, the Vessel. The rituals of enfeoffment could involve a gift of metal with which to cast the new commemorative vessel – we know this from an inscription on a bronze vessel from the reign of King Cheng (~1042 to 1021 BC). That has to cast new light on the whole big, beautiful pattern the Sequence of Hexagrams makes between hexagrams 3 and 50. (I’ve described these patterns more completely and clearly in Exploring the Sequence, available in the Change Circle Library.)
Then comes 3.1 – the absolute beginning of the beginning:
‘Encircled by stones.
Fruitful to settle with constancy,
Fruitful to establish feudal lords.’
When this line changes, it reveals Hexagram 8, Seeking Union, with its trigrams showing the rivers flowing over the earth. I remember the feudal outposts established along the Yellow River Valley – and the Image of Hexagram 8:
‘Above earth is the stream. Seeking Union.
The ancient kings founded countless cities for relationships with all the feudal lords.’
And finally Hexagram 16, Enthusiasm, or Anticipating – or Readiness, as Bradford Hatcher translates it.
‘Enthusiasm.
Fruitful to set up feudal lords and mobilise the armies.’
Now the feudal lords are linked with mobilisation. I’m no longer sure whether these armies will be marching from the regions to the capital or vice versa, but either way, the local lords will provide them with structure and direction.
Traditionally this is seen as the role of line 4, the single yang line, mobilising the army of yin lines. Action emerges from compliance like the outer trigram thunder from inner trigram earth. So R.J. Lynn translates the Oracle of 16 as,
‘It is fitting to establish a chief and to send the army into action.’
Hexagram 3 made me think of how feudal lords broke new ground and expanded the king’s realm; Hexagram 16 reminds me more of their role as defensive outposts. Energy is gathered and galvanised in 16 partly in sheer delight, and also partly to be ready. Remember the role of 16 in inspiring the creation of fortifications and warning systems?
‘They made defensive double gates and watchmen’s clappers to keep off marauders. This may have come from Yu.’ (16)
(That’s from the chapter of the Dazhuan that describes how certain hexagrams work almost as culture heroes.)
Feudal lords in readings
And so to the point of it all: will that extra bit of background information make a difference in readings?
I think – unsurprisingly – it depends on the reading. I can think of a couple where ‘install helpers’ is exactly the advice needed, and the rest is probably clutter. In the 45th episode of the podcast, Abby understood the feudal lords of Hexagram 3 as the people whose advice helped her to resolve a family conflict. In the 33rd, Joanna’s Hexagram 16 feudal lords made sense as relationships she could usefully develop in another country before moving her whole family there.
But I’ve also come across many readings where the extra background does help. Here are a few…
In the last podcast, with Hexagram 3 unchanging, Ludimila connected with the idea of feudal lords bringing knowledge and resources to the centre. In this connection, I really appreciate Bradford Hatcher’s wisdom on Hexagram 3:
‘And when it seems to be only you, against all the chaotic world, the trick is to rethink what ‘you’ is, to include the sum of all your helpers and all the resources at hand. Collect the wits first and start turning things to advantage.’
If we’re asking, ‘What helpers? There’s no-one to help me!’ – which in Hexagram 3, we well might be – this would have us think not so much of appointing the feudal lords as recognising where they already are, or converting aspects of the existing situation into feudal lords. (There’s an element of that in the historical picture, too: existing Shang rulers were involved in consolidating the Zhou kingdom.)
One idea that comes through again and again, especially with Hexagram 3 line 1 (and actually with Abby’s reading, too) is that of feudal lords as a network of mutual support that makes your world bigger. People caught amidst the ‘encircling stones’ might find new connections – often new friendships – beyond a claustrophobic family, or oppressive marriage or job, so that they can see themselves and their situation in a new way.
I had 3.1 as advice for the last Christmas I spent with my mother-in-law. She would come to stay with us, and she and I would sit together in the one small room of the house that could be kept (almost) warm enough for her comfort, where I wondered how to make things feel even slightly festive for her. The local church welcomed her with great, practical kindness to a beautiful Christmas service – but apart from that, she was happier staying in. We settled down inside the rock circle of her blindness and frailty, where Youtube videos of songs she remembered (every word of) from 70 years ago played the part of feudal lords, bringing more life and delight into our small room.
Also – especially with Hexagram 16 – it can help to think of feudal lords specifically as a defensive perimeter, expanding security.
For instance… I find I’ve received Hexagram 16 a couple of times when asking about the effect of fluoride on my teeth. (It forms a compound on the surface of the teeth that’s more acid-resistant than natural enamel.)
Then there’s a reading Balata shared on the forum: 16 unchanging as the best description of a composer who first hired assistants as he began to go deaf, and ended up passing off their work in its entirety as his own. You can see his ‘ghost composers’ as feudal lords, increasingly employed to defend a central self-concept.
(But on the other hand, and before I pigeon-hole 16’s feudal lords into a purely defensive role, there’s also a story on the forum of Hexagram 16 describing why someone couldn’t contact an elderly friend. He was fine; it was just that his students had got him a new email address and he needed to reinstate her as a phone contact.)
16’s feudal lords take on their organising, ordering role in podcast 52, where Roslyn needed to develop a business plan/ strategy/ structure (her word), not just throw spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick.
And in podcast 49, they were the people who run Family Constellations workshops and who are delegated there as representatives, who need to be interconnected in mutual support, as parts of a greater whole – ensuring the whole thing is grounded, not just a flight of fantasy. Lux called them the ‘people that hold the space‘.
A few portable ideas
If you’re a king establishing feudal lords, what might you be doing?
- creating an interconnected, mutually enriching network
- delegating and decentralising
- making your world bigger, opening up resources, creating greater resilience
- protecting the centre, creating more safety, holding the space