Rewards at the Close of the Campaign

The sixth line closes the hexagram after the campaign itself is over: at the close of the campaign the great ruler issues rewards, founding states and enfeoffing families, but small, undisciplined men should not be given such charge, or disorder follows. The line shifts the hexagram's attention from the conduct of the army to the settlement that follows it, a different kind of danger from the ones described in the earlier lines, the danger of misjudging character once the immediate crisis has passed and reward rather than command is being distributed. Founding states and granting families their standing are substantial, lasting acts, and the line's warning is precise: the same discipline that mattered in choosing a commander during the campaign matters again, differently, in choosing who receives lasting authority once it is over.

Read as the final line of a hexagram devoted to organized force, this line insists that the responsibilities created by a successful campaign do not end with victory, and that handing real authority to those without the character to hold it responsibly recreates exactly the disorder the whole campaign was meant to resolve. Later readers have noted that this is the only line in the hexagram concerned with civil rather than military judgment, marking a deliberate shift in subject at the very close of a sequence otherwise devoted to the conduct of the campaign itself.