The Army, Line 6

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.

The campaign itself is finished by this line, and what remains is judgment about its aftermath rather than any further action within it. A yin stroke stands in an even position, correctly placed by the standard rule, at the very top of the hexagram, the station classical commentary treats as spent or passing, a situation that has run its course rather than one still actively unfolding. When this line changes, the top stroke of Kun becomes firm, turning the upper trigram into Gen, the mountain that keeps still, while the lower trigram Kan remains fixed below.

The resulting hexagram is Number 4, Youthful Folly, mountain over water, an image of inexperience and untested capacity in need of patient instruction rather than premature responsibility. That the line's own warning against giving lasting charge to small, undisciplined men should transform into the hexagram most concerned with immature judgment needing guidance is a pointed final echo, closing The Army not on the memory of the campaign itself but on the ongoing question of who is, and who is not yet, ready to be trusted with what it won. Read across the whole hexagram's six lines, this final change completes a movement from the discipline needed to begin a campaign to the discipline needed to end one honestly, both resting on the same insistence that position alone never substitutes for genuine capability.