The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises success, likens the moment to a king who attains abundance, and counsels one not to be sad but to be like the sun at midday, enjoying the fullness while aware that noon must give way to afternoon. The Image speaks of the superior person who decides lawsuits and carries out punishments, using clarity and movement while the light is strong. The core theme is abundance at its peak, to be enjoyed with awareness that culmination cannot last. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that shades the reading.

The Judgment and Image paraphrased above draw on two of the Ten Wings, commentarial texts appended to the Yijing and traditionally credited to Confucius, though the attribution was already doubted within the Chinese tradition by the eleventh century and modern scholarship instead dates their composition to roughly the fourth to second century BCE, well after the Zhou Yi core itself. Wang Bi's third-century commentary read passages like this one from Feng philosophically, playing down the trigram image-correlations earlier commentators relied on, while Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi pushed back the other way, insisting the book remain readable as the divination manual it began as.