Water spread across the ground, filling every hollow it finds. Holding Together is about allegiance freely given, and its central image is a royal hunt driven on three sides only, with the fourth left open.
Eighth in the King Wen order. The Sequence places it after The Army: once a multitude exists something has to bind it together, and bi is the name the book gives that union.
The Judgement says this is fortunate, and then attaches an unusual instruction: consult again, and ask whether what you have is great, lasting and correct. If it is, there is no blame. Those who are unsettled will come. Whoever arrives late meets misfortune.
The instruction to consult a second time is the strange part, given that Hexagram 4 explicitly forbids repeating a consultation. The difference is what is being asked. There the second asking was about the answer; here it is about yourself, and the question is whether you are the sort of person worth attaching to. That is the hexagram's whole condition. Allegiance is fortunate on the assumption that whoever receives it deserves it, and the text does not assume that. It asks.
The Image says there is water on the earth, and that the ancient kings accordingly established the many states and kept close relations with their lords.
Two things are worth noting. The picture is water lying on the ground rather than inside it, which is the difference between this hexagram and The Army: there the water was hidden in the earth, here it is spread over it, in contact everywhere, following the shape of what it rests on. And the actor is the ancient kings rather than the noble person, which is unusual. Most Images recommend private conduct. This one describes a political arrangement, and what it recommends is maintaining relationships with people you do not directly control.
Holding Together is five yin lines with a single yang at the fifth place, which is the exact mirror of The Army. There the one strong line was low, in the field, commanding. Here it is at the top, in the ruler's seat, and everything else in the figure is attached to it voluntarily rather than under orders.
The subject is allegiance: union, alliance, belonging, the act of joining yourself to something. The line texts run through the ways of doing it. From inside, which is fortunate. From outside, which is also fortunate. With the wrong people, which the text marks with no verdict at all, simply naming it. And at the end, joining with no head, which is the only clearly bad outcome in the hexagram.
What makes the hexagram unusual is the fifth line's condition. The king hunts on three sides and leaves the fourth open; game that runs away is allowed to go, and the townspeople do not chase it. Allegiance is fortunate here precisely because it is not compelled. What changes the reading is which end you are on. Asked by someone deciding whether to join something, the third line is the relevant warning and the question is who exactly you are attaching to. Asked by someone who wants others to attach to them, the Judgement's condition applies, and it is not flattering: go and check whether you are worth it.
In a relationship question this is one of the more favourable figures in the book. It describes attachment, union, two people or a group genuinely held together. The second and fourth lines both approve the union, one sought from within and one from outside.
The condition is the fifth line. The hunt leaves one side open. What the figure approves is a bond that permits leaving, and it says the good fortune depends on that. Applied honestly, a relationship held together because the other person has nowhere to go is not this hexagram. The top line, joining with no head, is the other warning: attachment with nothing at the centre of it, which is the shape a relationship takes when neither person can say what it is for.
At work this is the figure for alliance rather than command: a coalition, a partnership, a team that holds because people want to be in it. Its inverse is The Army, and the contrast is the useful part. One structure runs on orders and one runs on attachment.
The Judgement's instruction is the hard one for anyone in charge: examine whether what you are offering is great, lasting and correct, because that is what the attachment rests on. The clause about latecomers meeting misfortune is worth reading carefully. It describes timing in a forming alliance: positions get taken, and someone who waits to see how it goes before committing arrives to find the good ones gone. That is an observation about how coalitions fill up, not a prediction about you.
In a money question this describes something shared: a joint arrangement, a partnership, money that binds people to each other. The hexagram's interest is in the terms of the attachment rather than the amount.
The third line is the one that applies, and it is joining with people who are not the right people. The text gives no verdict, which in this book is itself a comment. The fifth line's open side is the other thing to hold on to, because an arrangement you cannot leave is a different proposition from one you can. None of this evaluates anything. The text cannot see your circumstances or read a contract, and where money and other people are combined that is work for someone qualified.
Leave a side open. That is the fifth line and it is the hexagram's whole method: if you want people held to something, the holding has to survive them being free to go. Practically, that means saying out loud that leaving is permitted, and meaning it. If you are the one deciding whether to join, do the Judgement's second consultation on the other party rather than on yourself, and be specific about who exactly you would be attaching to.
Attach yourself sincerely and there is no blame. Sincerity like a full earthen jar, and in the end other good things come. Yin in a yang place, not correct, at the bottom: the beginning of an attachment, before anything has been established. The jar is the useful image, because an earthen vessel is plain, cheap and either full or not. Nothing about display. Changing it gives Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning, which is what the same start looks like without the sincerity.
Attaching from within. Holding firm brings good fortune. Yin in a yin place and central in the lower trigram: correct and central, and it corresponds directly to the strong fifth line. This is allegiance that comes from your own position and your own reasons rather than from being recruited. The qualifier matters: holding firm. The line approves attachment that keeps its own footing, which is a different thing from absorption. Changing it gives Hexagram 29, The Abysmal.
Attaching to the wrong people. Yin in a yang place, not correct, at the top of the lower trigram and the most exposed spot in the figure. This is the shortest line text in the hexagram and the only one with no verdict attached at all: no good fortune, no misfortune, no blame. The text simply names the situation and stops, which readers have found unnerving for two thousand years. Changing it gives Hexagram 39, Obstruction.
Attaching from outside. Holding firm brings good fortune. Yin in a yin place, correct, at the bottom of the upper trigram and directly below the ruling line. The second line attached from within its own sphere; this one attaches from outside, having crossed into the upper trigram to do it. Both are approved, which is the hexagram being even-handed about where legitimate allegiance comes from. Changing it gives Hexagram 45, Gathering Together, where the same impulse becomes an assembly.
Allegiance made visible. The king drives the game on three sides and lets what runs ahead escape. His townspeople need no warning. Good fortune. Yang in a yang place and central: correct, central, in the ruler's seat, and the only strong line in the figure. The hunt is the point. Closing all four sides would catch more and would also mean that everything present is present under compulsion. Leaving one open is what makes the rest allegiance. Changing it gives Hexagram 2, The Receptive.
Attaching with no head. Misfortune. Yin in a yin place, correct, and past the top. The phrase can be read as joining without a beginning or as joining with nothing at the head of it, and both readings land in the same place: an attachment with no centre and no starting point. It is the only unambiguous misfortune in the hexagram, and it comes last, after every legitimate form of joining has been described. Changing it gives Hexagram 20, Contemplation.
The lower trigram is Kun, Earth; the upper is Kan, Water. Water resting on the ground, which is the Image's picture, and the difference from Hexagram 7 is precisely the order of the two: there the water was inside the earth, here it lies on top of it, touching everywhere and taking the ground's shape.
One yang line among five yin, at the fifth place. That is the mirror of The Army, where the single strong line sat at the second. A strong line low down commands; a strong line at the top attracts. Note also that four of the six lines here are correct by position, which is unusually orderly, and the two that are not are the first and the third, which are the beginning of an attachment and the attachment to the wrong people.
The nuclear hexagram is Hexagram 23, Splitting Apart, which is a hard thing to find inside a figure about union. What the structure says that the surface does not is that groups held together by attachment are the ones that come apart from below, one line at a time, and that this is latent in them from the start. The inverse is Hexagram 7, The Army; the opposite, every line reversed, is Hexagram 14, Possession in Great Measure.
The oldest layer here is the political vocabulary of the early Zhou. Bi means to be close to, to ally with, to compare. The line texts describe the mechanics of allegiance in a state made of semi-independent territories: joining from within, joining from outside, joining with the wrong people, and the royal hunt in the fifth line, which is a real ceremonial practice and not a metaphor.
The three-sided hunt is documented outside the book. Driving game on three sides and leaving the fourth open was a recognised royal convention, understood as a display of restraint by a ruler who could have closed the circle. The line takes that practice and makes it the model for how allegiance should be held. That is an old idea and a durable one, and it is one of the few places where the book's imagery can be checked against independent historical evidence.
The Ten Wings supplied the Image, and its attribution of the conduct to the ancient kings rather than to the noble person is deliberate: this is one of a small group of Images that describe statecraft instead of private virtue. The Xu Gua places the hexagram after The Army by observing that a multitude must have someone to attach to. James Legge's 1882 English keeps the feudal vocabulary; Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German, reaching English through Cary Baynes in 1950, turned it toward personal relationships, which is why most modern treatments read this as a hexagram about friendship rather than about political allegiance.
The most common misreading is treating this as a warm hexagram about belonging. It is favourable, and its favour is conditional. The Judgement asks you to check whether what you have is great, lasting and correct before accepting that the allegiance is deserved, and the fifth line makes the good fortune depend on leaving people free to go. Attachment without those two conditions is a different figure.
The second is skipping the third line. It says attaching to the wrong people and gives no verdict, and a page that lists five good outcomes and omits the one line with no comfort in it has changed what the hexagram says. The absence of a verdict is not neutrality. In a text that hands out good fortune and misfortune freely, silence on a line about attaching to the wrong people is the most eloquent thing in the figure.
The third is using the clause about latecomers as pressure. Whoever comes late meets misfortune reads well as urgency, and it gets deployed to tell people to commit now. In context it is a description of how alliances fill, not an instruction to hurry, and combining it with the fifth line's open side gives the opposite emphasis. A hexagram that insists attachment must be uncompelled cannot coherently be used to rush somebody into one.
Put a real question to the coins.