The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises supreme success through perseverance but adds a warning: when the eighth month comes there will be misfortune, for what is now waxing must in time wane. The Image speaks of the superior person who is inexhaustible in the will to teach and boundless in tolerance toward the people. The core theme is ascendancy and approach, welcomed but held with awareness of its season. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that adjusts the reading.

Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi, the Song Neo-Confucian synthesis most later readers encountered Lin through, treated the Judgment above first as a divination formula and only secondarily as moral instruction, a corrective to Cheng Yi's more purely philosophical Yichuan Yizhuan. The Mawangdui silk manuscript, recovered from a sealed Han tomb in 1973 and dated before 168 BCE, preserves closely related material in a wholly different sequence, organized by paired trigrams rather than the King Wen order, evidence that the hexagram texts still circulated in more than one arrangement this late. In the King Wen sequence, Approach (Lin), hexagram 19, is paired with its inversion: Contemplation (Guan), hexagram 20. Translations of the Judgment above vary by tradition: Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German rendering, carried into English by Cary Baynes for the 1950 Bollingen edition, gives the text a mystical, aphoristic cast, while James Legge's earlier and more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads the same lines closer to a historical record.