The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, likens the moment to a sacrifice in which the ceremonial washing has been performed but the offering not yet made: a time of reverent attention, when those below look up in trust. The Image speaks of the ancient kings who visited the regions, observed the people and gave them instruction. The core theme is contemplation, the example set by those above and the moral influence of being seen. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that shades the counsel.

Tradition assigns the hexagram statement to King Wen of Zhou, the line statements to the Duke of Zhou and the Ten Wings commentary to Confucius; modern scholarship accepts none of the three attributions, treating the core instead as an anonymous Western Zhou compilation later overlaid, from the fourth to second century BCE, by the Ten Wings that supply the Image and the language of the superior person used above. Between them stand two further layers of reading, Wang Bi's third-century philosophical commentary and Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi; the one played down the trigram image-correlations, the other reasserted the text's identity as a divination manual. In the King Wen sequence, Contemplation (Guan), hexagram 20, is paired with its inversion: Approach (Lin), hexagram 19. 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.