The Family

The family is society in embryo: the small circle in which the Book of Changes locates the origin of all social order. The image recurs because the oracle holds that order radiates outward from the household and cannot be decreed inward from the state. The title hexagram, 37 Chia Jên - The Family (The Clan), says it directly: "The family is society in the embryo; it is the native soil on which performance of moral duty is made early through natural affection." Its Judgment is brief, "THE FAMILY. The perseverance of the woman furthers," and its commentary derives the whole world from the ordered household: "If the father is really a father and the son a son... then the family is in order. When the family is in order, all the social relationships of mankind will be in order."

The Image of the same hexagram grounds household order in character and speech, influence working from within outward like wind born of fire:

Thus the superior man has substance in his words
And duration in his way of life.

The father at his best governs by trust rather than fear: "As a king he approaches his family. / Fear not. / Good fortune." The inherited household fault is the model of all reform of decayed conditions in 18 Ku - Work on what has been spoiled (Decay), whose lines return again and again to "Setting right what has been spoiled by the father" and "Setting right what has been spoiled by the mother." And the family extends upward through time at the ancestral rite: in 45 Ts'ui - Gathering Together (Massing) "The family gathers about the father as its head," and through "the sacrifice to the ancestors, at which the whole clan is gathered together," the dead are woven into the living so that the clan "cannot be dispersed or dissolved." The wider brotherhood of 13 T'ung Jên - Fellowship with Men begins from this same hearth, and 54 Kuei Mei - The Marrying Maiden shows the maiden entering the household on which everything depends.

Here the Changes is at its most Confucian, and the Taoist echo is correspondingly quiet: it lies in the insistence that order radiates outward from the inner room, by atmosphere and example rather than command, the household governed as the Taoist sage governs the state, from within and almost invisibly.