The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises success and favors the administration of justice, for when something obstructs union it must be energetically removed, as teeth bite through what lies between them. The Image joins thunder and lightning, and speaks of the ancient kings who made firm the laws and clear the penalties. The core theme is decisive action, including just correction, against an obstacle. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that colors 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 Shi He 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.