The Wanderer

The wanderer is the stranger in a strange land, the figure whose home is the road. The image recurs because the Book of Changes must counsel not only rulers at the center of things but the displaced person at the margin, for whom every resting place is provisional. The full portrait is 56 Lü - The Wanderer, fire on the mountain that "does not linger in one place, but travels on to new fuel." Its commentary states the condition plainly: "A wanderer has no fixed abode; his home is the road." And its Judgment prescribes the wanderer's whole strategy:

THE WANDERER. Success through smallness.
Perseverance brings good fortune
To the wanderer.

The lines trace the costs of this life. Even at its best there is no ease: "The wanderer rests in a shelter. / He obtains his property and an ax. / My heart is not glad," for he "is persistently conscious of being a stranger in a strange land." Carelessness is fatal to one without a circle of friends: the truculent stranger's "inn burns down" and he "loses the steadfastness of his young servant," while at the top the wanderer who forgets himself in laughing and jesting finds that "Through carelessness he loses his cow," that is, his modesty and adaptability.

The superior man in dark times becomes a wanderer too. In 36 Ming I - Darkening of the light, "The superior man does not eat for three days / On his wanderings. / But he has somewhere to go." And in 25 Wu Wang - Innocence (The Unexpected) the road's strange economy appears from the other side: "The cow that was tethered by someone / Is the wanderer's gain, the citizen's loss."

The Taoist parallel is Chuang Tzu's free and easy wandering, the sage at home everywhere because attached nowhere, though the Changes is more sober about what the road exacts in vigilance and loneliness. And the wanderer's success through smallness, keeping low, claiming little, remaining obliging, is pure Tao Te Ching: the strategy of the soft and the small carried into foreign lands.