The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, warns that sincerity meets obstruction; one should be cautious and halt midway rather than press a quarrel to the bitter end, and it is fortunate to seek a great and impartial person while unfavorable to embark on a great undertaking. The Image counsels considering the beginning of any affair, since conflict is best avoided before it starts. The core theme is dispute and litigation held in check. As in every hexagram, any line received as a moving (changing) line transforms into its opposite, yielding 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 Song 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.